Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender /

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender /

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender The British takeover of Poona in 1818 marked a disruption in the structure of relations established during the Peshwai. The colonial intervention in western India set off and created new patterns in social relations which need to be explored and analysed. From the standpoint of gender, caste, and the state, certain questions are particularly relevant. How far did the hold of Brahmanism and Brahmanical patriarchy break or get reformulated once the direct control of the Brahmanas upon the state (as in the Peshwai) gave way? How did other social groups react to the new political situation and in what way was pendes shaped by, or a shaper of, some of these new social forces?

Immediately after their takeover of power in the Poona region the British were keen not to appear to have caused a major disruption in the social life of its inhabitants.* The British were not merely cautious of but almost placatory towards the existing ruling class which, in the Peshwa's erstwhile territory, meant the Brahmanas.? In the Deccan there would be no great haste in introducing drastic changes based on English law such as those initiated by Cornwallis in Bengal and there was substantial support for wanting to develop a system 'more in harmony with Indian ways'. On the whole, Elphinstone was keen to maintain Maratha institutions and ways of government.

In particular the new administration was anxious to conciliate the Brahmanas as a class. The new rulers were aware that while only a section of the Brahmanas had held office under the old government, the bulk of them had benefitted because the Brahmanas had held the leading positions in it and that therefore

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they had derived substantial benefits from it in a variety of ways.

Thus, however 'neutral' the new government professed to be in matters of religion, the Brahmanas would notice and dislike the changed situation especially since the supposed 'neutrality' would not satisfy their material needs. There was also a recognition that the Brahmanas had considerable influence over public opinion. It was therefore necessary to placate them.

One important way in which this was done was by continuing the custom of giving grants to temples and the annual dakshina festival, distributing money to individual Brahmanas, although in a more modest and altered way. A special attempt was made to ensure the satisfaction of the more important and learned shastris selected from among those on whom Bajirao used to lavish large sums. There was also a recognition that if the most learned men were brought to look up to the government for support they would willingly render any service the government should wish, such as revising the laws of the Shastras, or settling their doubtful and disputed meaning." Other important members of the ruling class, such as holders of jagirs and inams, also retained their privileges.

After negotiation, protracted in some cases, all the great jagirdars were allowed 'practical independence' within their jagirs. This was in accordance with the fundamental principle of the settlement that their position should not be worse than it had been under the former government.° The British administration had thus acknowledged the importance of preserving the privileges of chiefs with a view to having some portion of the old nobility 'flourishing and contented'.' Since many of the great jagirdars and inamdars were Brahmanas, their power, both religious and secular, was not radically altered by the early working of the colonial state in the Poona region.® Given the British anxiety to prevent disaffection, moderate the impact of the colonial takeover, and conciliate those anxious about their new status, especially the Brahmanas, it is not surprising that a non-Brahmana raiyat told Elphinstone, the governor of Bombay, in 1823 that the 'power of the Brahmanas is doubled since they lost the country'.?

The same anxiety led the colonial state to steer a path away from the Christian missionaries who saw in the British takeover of the Poona region an opportunity for expanding their own activities.

When a missionary suggested the establishment of mission schools in the Deccan in 1818, Elphinstone, who recognised that professed

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

neutrality in religious matters would not, in itself, allay the fears of the Brahmanas, replied that the government would not want them to be alarmed by fears of conversion.!° It was therefore Elphinstone's policy to exclude the missionaries from the Deccan in the early stages of colonial rule.

The problem of the relationship of the colonial state to Christianity and to certain practices within Hinduism, as British tule was consolidated, was more complex. While practical considerations demanded caution and flexibility in handling customs such as the dakshina grants to temples, they nevertheless created certain dilemmas. In 1842 the British withdrew a particular cash allowance to the Dev of Cincvad on grounds of its 'official connection' with idolatry. How much this position owed to the colonial state being wedged between its own rationalist or even

Christian ideology and the aggressiveness of the Christian missionaries is difficult to say without close examination. What is apparent, however, is the shifting position of the British, first in terminating and then in renewing the allowance to the Dev!! as they floundered for a policy that would safeguard them from all sides.

Early British attitudes to gender fell into a familiar pattern. It was necessary to establish control over the subjects of the new colonial state and without ruffling the feelings of the Brahmanas and other important groups, take over existing norms while making a point about their own notions of social order. The handling of gender was therefore complex and cannot be seen only in issues like sati but in the everyday actions of the executive.

One such action occurred soon after the British takeover of Poona when Robertson, the new British collector, proceeded to act with vigour against 'immorality'. In Robertson's view, the greatest evil was 'infidelity in the marriage bed'. Reforms in this sphere would be of political value in his opinion especially since a check to practices 'sanctioned' by the Peshwai would make for a comparison highly favourable to the British government. An opportunity arose when the police arrested a Brahmana for having committed adultery with a widow of the same caste and had attempted to settle the matter with a bribe to the police. The latter had initially demanded Rs 15, which was scaled down to Rs 6, whereupon the Brahmana offender was freed. Robertson deftly combined the old and the new in his handling of the issue. The

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Brahmana offender and the widow were sent round the town: the widow's face was blackened, her garments were tied to those of the adulterer while the public crier proclaimed their offence. This was a traditional punishment but Robertson's proclamation was so framed as to simultaneously show the even-handedness of British justice: the offending Brahmana was awarded Rs 20 to compensate for his ill-treatment at the hands of the police.'*

The upholding of traditional norms was the dominant motif in the handling of gender in the early years of colonial rule in Maharashtra. This is evident from the decision of the Elphinstone government (Regulation II of 1827) to uphold the authority of panchayats in certain classes of disputes. The Bombay government felt that the introduction of a court system based on western norms into many matters of a civil nature would swamp the courts with work and cause a stagnation of business.!* Further, the panchayat system was 'popular' with the people who referred to the panches as Panch Parmeshwar.'* The Bombay government felt that the system rested on popular initiative and was an integral part of society. Thus, Regulation II of 1827 (Section 27) held that civil courts had no jurisdiction to deal with caste questions.!> Matters of caste custom (like marriage norms and practices) remained with the existing system of panchayats. Caste custom could also be regarded as an aspect of the 'religion' of a caste as we shall see below. From the standpoint of this study it may be noted that since the purity of caste and normative marriage arrangements were contingent upon the monitoring of female sexuality, its violation subjected women to the authority of the panchayat which, as we have seen earlier, could result in loss of caste, kin and community.

Women whose major 'lapses' or crimes related in the main to marriage rules, thus continued to be governed by traditional laws executed through the panchayats and were not immediately, and in all matters, provided with the 'protection' of the British courts.

That women were entirely dispensible to the agenda of the British during their early rule in western India, was starkly brought out in the case of the murder of a young girl of 15 or 16 by Appa

Desai, the great Jagirdar of Nipani, in 1825. Since the offender was a prominent member of the ruling elite and close to the deposed

Peshwa, the British found it expedient not to intervene in any way — the murder was regarded as a 'minor irregularity'; it was also argued that since, under the Peshwas, the great jagirdars had powers

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender 47 of life and death over their subjects, there was no justification for the government to intervene except in cases where there were

The attitude to gender was also clearly tailored by caste and class considerations. Accepting the notion of private space in the case of women from upper caste and class backgrounds, the law was to respect 'traditional' norms in relation to them. Bhil women however, were treated exactly like their menfolk in a 'war of extermination' unleashed against them by the British. One of the lieutenants employed in a punitive campaign burnt 35 dwellings in a Bhil settlement, killed six persons including two women and took

13 women prisoner. The episode excited the ardour of the lieutenant and he hoped to have the pleasure of 'spilling more blood'. While the administrative authorities chastised the lieutenant for using intemperate language in an official despatch, and there was some correspondence on the tactics to be adopted in further campaigns, no doubts seem to have been raised on how Bhil women were treated by the British authorities. !7

The handling of sati during the years up to 1830 epitomises the contradictory pulls experienced by the early colonial state in western

India in relation to gender, law and tradition. Various positions were adopted and experiments initiated in an attempt to reconcile these. Again the key concern appears to have been to create the least disaffection and carry the endorsement of the Brahmanas as far as possible. The many policies adopted included the attempt to define, regulate and persuade rather than to consider abolition.'® Significant aspects of 'persuasion' were recommendations at different times of offering pensions to widows (a practice associated with the Peshwai) who had been dissuaded from self-immolation, maintenance to male kinsfolk to provide for the widow's support, the offer of a government job to male kinsfolk who agreed to support the widow, and the termination of government jobs of those men in whose families women had been immolated. None of these policies was sustained for any length of time because it was feared that the government's gesture of granting maintenance or a gift would be misused.'? Throughout, there was an attempt to find a 'native' solution to terminating the practice and a recognition that Maharashtra was different from Bengal. After the abolition of sati

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in Bengal, Malcolm, the new Governor of Bombay Presidency, was still recalling the spectre of Brahmana discontent."° In western

India what clinched the adoption of a position on issues of gender was the potential for sedition by the Brahmanas who had lost the powers they had under the Peshwai and therefore had to be

'conciliated'.

II While the British were keen to act cautiously with respect to 'tradition' and 'religion' and keep Brahmanical discontent within containable levels, the end of the Peshwai implied the emergence of a new political configuration. That power was not now directly in the hands of the Brahmanas was quickly grasped by various castes and the British takeover was thus perceived as an occasion which opened up the possibilities of contestation and an altered socio-political order. It was clearly a moment to be seized by castes excluded from the privileged place occupied by the Brahmanas.

The Peshwai had also been a period of contestation between various castes with the Chitpavan Brahmana figuring as one of the disputants in all contests. These were not always resolved but in the cases where they were, the resolution invariably had to do with who had more access to state power among the disputants. Other disputes which remained unresolved or had been temporarily resolved could be re-opened when the balance of political forces was altered. One of the first caste disputes to come up was among the Panchal Devajna Sonars and the various Brahmana jatis of Poona. It had remained unsettled, at least as far as the Sonars were concerned, throughout the Peshwai for about a century. When it resurfaced in 1822, it immediately became a test case for the British position on caste disputes. Briefly, the details of the case"! were as follows:

The Konkane Sonars (Sonars from Konkan) calling themselves the Panchal Devajna Rathakaras had claimed the right to observe

16 major samskaras according to the Vedic instruction (Vedokta) and the performance of the munja (investiture of the sacred thread) for their boys. In 1822, a dispute between the Devajnas and Brahmanas was triggered off with the performance of a munja ceremony at the house of a Sonar. The ceremony was performed by a Brahmana but another Brahmana faction of that city led by

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender 49 Malhar Mule took serious objection to the proceedings, contacted the Poona Brahmanas and secured an award from their elders censuring the Brahmana who had performed the investiture. The 'erring' Brahmana was threatened with physical punishment if he did not undergo penance and he, in turn, appealed to Pottinger, the collector of Ahmednagar, for protection. Pottinger took immediate action and ordered the flogging of the leader of the censuring party, much to the dismay of the Governor-in-Council in Bombay who considered that non-interference in caste disputes was so obviously expedient that the collector ought to have known that without specific instruction.

The case was forwarded to Poona for a trial by the panchayat.

The applicants (those who objected to the performance of Vedic rites) also demanded that the Sonar be punished for infringing the dignity of the Brahmanas, and further that the Sonars should be disallowed the Vedic rites through a government decree. A panchayat of five Brahmanas was appointed with a sixth as sarpanch or 'referee' by the Brahmanas. The Poona Brahmanas were the plaintiffs and the erring Nagar Brahmanas were the defendants.

The final verdict of the panchayat was, predictably, a refusal to accept any of the documentary evidence provided on behalf of the Sonars as authentic; they ruled that the Sonars should 'maintain the distance' between Brahmanas and lower castes through appropriate behaviour, wear their dhotis as prescribed for lower castes and not in Brahmana fashion, use images of copper and avoid the use of namaskar as a form of greeting, besides other things.

Most significantly, the Brahmana award concluded also that its execution rested with the government, which was required to summon, fine and admonish the Sonars not to offend again. At the same time, the offending Brahmanas of Nagar who had actually conducted the Vedic rites for the Sonars, were sentenced to perform expiatory rites. The government responded by permitting the disciplining of the fellow-caste men but not the Sonars. Finally, the Sonars dismissed their erstwhile Brahmana priests and carried on practising the Vedokta.

The dispute between the Devajna Sonars and the Brahmanas is notable in a number of ways. To begin with, because it was the first jati dispute to come up before the British after the collapse of the Peshwai, it is representative of the issue of contestations between castes. It is also important because it marks a recognition by castes

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seeking high status, and others already established as high, who resisted such moves, and was a crucial moment in the history of rank-ordering which could reverse or reinforce the power of the Brahmanas. Although the controversy between the Brahmanas and Sonars was located in Ahmednagar, it was the Poona Brahmanas, particularly the Chitpavans among them, who took the lead in chastising their own caste-fellows and in disciplining the Sonars.

For the Konkanastha Chitpavan Brahmanas, as those who had virtually controlled state power during the Peshwai and consequently the caste most adversely affected by its collapse, the situation was most volatile. It is not surprising that in opposing the claims of the Sonars the Poona Brahmanas led by the Chitpavans under Nilkantha Shastri stated that their 'dignity' had been infringed."

Caste Contestations occurred outside western India as well, for example in the territories of the British in south India where too the British courts were expected to decide such contests. The contestations did not always run the same course in the different arenas. However, the decisions in one area were used as evidence in others.2? Further, simmering disputes could be reopened depending upon particular resolutions. The dispute between Chitpavans and Kayastha Prabhus of Pune and Satara going back to the Peshwai, culminated in Baroda in favour of the Prabhus. It was reopened when the Chitpavans, following the Bombay government's permission to impose sanctions on recalcitrant members of the their own caste, appealed to the Bombay government to force the Baroda state to implement sanctions against the recalcitrant Brahmanas there.?* Occasions of reverses for the Brahmanas came up when non-Brahmana ruling elites enabled other non-Brahmana castes to assert their claims to high status as part of their own ongoing contests against the Brahmanas.??

Caste contests were also occasions when castes mobilised their caste-fellows across regions. Devajna Sonars in the Deccan drew upon the support of influential business community of Sonar shetias from Bombay. One of the most important shetias of Bombay,

Jagannath Shankarseth, a Sonar, made an effective intervention when it appeared that the British were siding with the Brahmanas.

The Governor-in-Council in Bombay quickly reassured Jagannath that the Pune decision would not be applied in Bombay."

The Sonar-Brahmana dispute in the Deccan was clearly a test

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case for formulating policy guidelines by the new colonial state for jati laws. It caught the British in a bind since they did not want to take a public stand against the Brahmanas in Poona. While they were certain of the need to maintain neutrality on religious matters, they were in a difficult position when both parties in the dispute complained that 'their' religion was being 'infringed and interfered with'. The situation was aggravated because both sides cited textual evidence which the British were convinced had been tailored to suit the occasion.?"

Faced with the trap of administering such a situation among contending castes, the British floundered: the colonial state was not unified in its response. The Commissioner for the Deccan stationed at Poona favoured the Brahmanas and used the argument of Shastric penalty for Shudras violating the ban on reading the Vedas which he believed the British were pledged to continue. The Commissioner's pro-Brahmana stand was consistent: its rationale was dual. The first part was the familiar argument about not ruffling the feathers of the erstwhile ruling class. But most pragmatically he also argued that maintaining the hierarchical order would keep the 'subjects' disunited and unable to combine against the British. An equalising policy would ultimately reduce British stability in his view.

The Governor-in-Council in Bombay, however, ruled against the Commissioner and argued that the different castes should be left to sort out their own rules. Thus, while the Brahmanas could 'enforce' discipline upon fellow Brahmanas, it was not for the British or for the Brahmanas to enforce discipline against the actions of the Sonars."?

The crux of the matter in the Sonar-Brahmana dispute had been the Brahmana demand that the British ensure the compliance of other castes with Brahmana superiority and punish defiance when it occurred. The new colonial state was unwilling to accept a role in which it had to impose legal strictures upon the defiers. The 'neutrality' of the British in relation to disputes about rank order was the space into which the non-Brahmana castes inserted themselves.

Using this space, the Somars carried the day; emboldened by the neutrality, they dismissed the Brahmana priests who were refusing to perform certain rites for them and raised a new controversy. The Brahmanas wanted to remain the priests of the Sonars and receive the ritual fee without conceding the Vedokta

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to the Sonars. However, they had no means of enforcing such an arrangement in the new political situation where the alliance between them and the state had been disrupted. A number of castes could now seek upward social mobility, defy the disapproval of Brahmanas who were unable to chastise them and finally use the Census to establish their claim to high status.

The British could see that they had opened up a Pandora's box.

The Sonar-Brahmana dispute and its complexities led the Bombay government to launch an all-India consultation on the status of the Sonars. In 1824 the British tried to elicit information on how previous governments had dealt with other such 'false' claims.*°

They also needed to know what customs operated in different parts of the country. To this end information from 75 castes in Poona was sought on a list of questions which were used in formulating the Code of Regulations or the Panchayat Law of 1827.>!

Significantly, gender was a crucial component of disputes about caste status. Apart from practices relating to samskaras, investiture, and the recitation of Vedic mantras it was the purity of the women that established a caste's claim to high status. In claiming the right to Vedokta and upabrahmana status, the Devajna Sonars contended that on the death of their husbands, their women underwent a tonsure, did not marry a second time, observed enforced widowhood, and that some even practised self-immolation.** Since there were many sub-groups among the Sonars, who claimed the right to Vedokta and the upabrahmana status, the distinction between the Devajna Sonars and ordinary Sonars needed to be established; here too the different practices of enforced widowhood and the practice of pat were a critical determinant of their varying statuses. When Steele's survey of castes was conducted in the Poona region, only one other sub-group among the Sonars, the Kanade

Sonars, listed enforced widowhood as a prevalent custom. The rest accepted the practice of pat marriages among their sub-groups and did not press any claims to the Vedokta or upabrahmana status.*?

From this we may deduce that not all sub-castes among the Sonars were equally socially mobile.

In resisting the Vedokta claims of the Devajna Sonars the Poona Brahmanas were deeply conscious of the place of enforced widowhood in determining high status. Thus, at the height of the controversy they admonished the Sonars and ruled that a widow was allowed to remarry in the Sonar jati and if she was so inclined

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

the Sonars should not be allowed to prevent it: if they did they should be fined.34 The intimate relationship between caste status and gender codes had a long history in pre-colonial India and that link was not likely to weaken suddenly in the new socio-political situation.

In 1830, another caste contestation erupted between the Marathas and the Brahmanas which highlighted the nature of the moment represented by the British capture of state power. It is important here to note the double moves made by the Maratha caste in defining itself, the place of gender in such a contest, and ideological parameters within which such caste contestations occurred and the manner in which they fed into the non-Brahmana movement.

The first volley in the Maratha-Brahmana contest was fired by Pratapsinh Bhosale, a nominal descendant of Shivaji. He had been installed as Chhatrapati in Satara by the British in the hope that this would remove a possible source of disaffection, and more importantly, establish a figure for western India who was not a Brahmana. In theory this might have helped to undercut the claims to social leadership of the Chitpavan Brahmana Peshwa and his supporters. However, Pratapsinh's position was one of symbolic importance rather than of real power as far as the British were concerned. His tenure in office from 1818 to 1839 was important for moves of upward social mobility within the Maratha-Kunbi cluster of castes, for the employment of varna divisions in the conduct of political rivalries, and for changes in the significance of the category of Maratha. The main feature of the period was a bitter, long-drawn-out dispute between elite Maratha families, led by Pratapsinh, and the Chitpavan Brahmanas of western Maharashtra. The issue was whether the elite families were entitied to call themselves Kshatriyas, which the Brahmanas now hotly contested. The struggle over the right to Vedokta by the Marathas was actually a struggle for political power and authority between Pratapsinh and the Chitpavans. Significantly, both the Brahmanas and the Marathas showed a sharp awareness that a fundamental change had occurred in the nature of their relationship with the assumption of power by the British. For the Marathas it was a moment when they might recover some of their lost position; for the Chitpavans it was a test case for staking their continued right

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to maintain and enforce the traditional religious hierarchies in matters of dispute over ritual and caste relations.>?

Between 1820 and 1828 the Brahmana party led by the Chitpavans, among whom the main protagonists were Balajipant

Natu, Chintamanrao Patwardhan and Nilkantha Shastri Thatte (the main actors in the Sonar dispute as well), campaigned to limit the Vedokta to the Brahmanas since in the Kaliyuga the true

Kshatriya had disappeared. There were now only two castes, the Brahmana and the Shudra, according to the Brahmana party. The offensive of the Brahmanas can be attributed to their growing awareness that the East India Company, unlike the Peshwas, was not prepared to take on the role of executors of the Brahmana religious authority. The Chitpavans, thus, feared that castes of all kinds would press claims to higher status that had been denied them under Peshwa rule, and their fears were being confirmed.*°

At this point it was necessary for Brahmana orthodoxy to assume an aggressive stance in retaining caste supremacy and to close ranks against others. The position of the Brahmanas against the Marathas, if it succeeded, would act as a deterrent and effectively scuttle similar moves by other, not so elite, castes and therefore the controversy was particularly virulent.

The Brahmana argument was based on two major positions: the first struck a mortal blow to Maratha sense of pride by questioning the validity of the rituals performed by Shivaji and his descendants.

Second, the Brahmanas emphasised the complete administrative dependence of the Marathas, as Shudras, upon their Brahmana ministers; they had, in the Brahmana view, never wielded authority although they might have had de-facto power which is all that, as Shudras, they could wield.?"

The whole dispute reached a climax in 1830 when it was decided to hold a public debate to resolve the issue. Each side appointed a team of pandits. The atmosphere was so tense over the days of the debate that Pratapsinh feared for the safety of the pandits and it was ironic that he came wearing a sword to protect them. The verdict of the debate confirmed Pratapsinh Bhosale's title to the Vedokta rites.

In seeking to have the Kshatriya status of the Bhosales (and therefore their right to the Vedokta) recognised Pratapsinh had to contend with the ambivalences in the category of Maratha.

Defining the Marathas as a varna and identifying the varna with

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

Kshatriya status, with rulership and mastery over land and military powers, meant confining the Kshatriya status to a small social elite distinct from the general category of the Kunbis. In establishing this distinctive identity, the claim to certain qualities, customs and practices went alongside a distancing from the humble Kunbis. For example the assal or 'true' Maratha families, claimed a genealogical link with the old kingly Rajput families of north India.38

Such a distinction was based upon the notion of marathamola or the ways and practices of the genuine Marathas which included a strict code for their women who would not appear before strangers. The supposed lack of purity of the women was something the Brahmanas had raised to reject the Maratha claim to Kshatriya status, saying that all pure Kshatriyas had been wiped out by Parashurama and that their women had then resorted to the Brahmanas to beget children and had thus lost caste.?? This was hotly contested by the Marathas in the 1830 debate. The Marathas claimed also that their womenfolk practised sacred widowhood and were barred from remarriage. It is significant that the charge of violating endogamy and thus causing the breakdown of caste was one of the main allegations against the Marathas. What is even more interesting is that the Kshatriya women who survived the massacre of their menfolk were alleged to have had relations with Brahmana men. Caste purity had to be maintained only by women.

An acceptance of the gender codes of the upper castes was the critical index in seeking the caste status of one of the three higher varnas, that is in the Brahmana, Kshatriya or Vaishya models whose lifestyle determined the status being claimed. In the case of the Marathas it was the lifestyle of the ruling class, the kingly model, which was a central element in distinguishing and distancing themselves from the Kunbi cluster of castes. Pratapsinh recorded his anxiety and irritation at the efforts of the ordinary Kunbi families to connect themselves to the assal families.4° The conflict between the Marathas and the Brahmanas reflects the limitations of a contest between elite groups; in essence it sought to reverse the situation which obtained under the Peshwas when the Brahmanas had become the dominant caste. There was no questioning of the hierarchy of the caste system. In varying degrees similar strategies were followed by non-elite groups such as the Kunbis in their attempt to change their status to a higher one. By the time the censuses of 1891 and 1901 were recorded, many Kunbis in certain

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districts were returning themselves as Marathas. At the same time other caste disputes such as those of the Sonars were following the same tactics in which gender codes played a crucial role in staking their claim to the Vedokta. The right to the Vedokta might be conceded only if it was established that a caste had traditionally practised celibate widowhood and sacred indissoluble marriage.

Every move of Sankritisation by a caste whether following the Brahmana, Kshatriya or Vaishya model, was predicated upon establishing the purity of its women.

The above disputes showed the emergence of a number of issues: the earlier dominance of the Brahmanas in the state as well as in civil society underwent certain changes. The British control of the state eroded the power of the Brahmanas in the state and to a certain extent this weakened Brahmana power even in civil society.

In the nineteenth century, the weakened hold of the Brahmanas on state power opened up the contestations of non-Brahmana castes who pressed their claims for a recognition of a higher status and brought on the resistance by the Brahmanas to the granting of such claims. The establishment of British power thus widened the arena of caste contestations.

However, these caste contestations were expressed in the traditional idiom, that is, by claiming the Vedokta and seeking the status of the Brahmanas or Kshatriyas and staking the claim itself on the purity of the caste and on established practice, or on the adoption by the caste of the highest gender codes. Ironically, the British presence, while opening up spaces for caste contestations indirectly, and unintentionally, provided for a renewal of those cultural values that reiterated traditional high-caste gender norms.

At the same time, since the British were cautious about the possibilities of Brahmana disaffection and also left the jagirdars in possession of their lands they did not disrupt the local power structures. Traditional structures of dominance did not therefore undergo major changes in the first few decades of colonial authority in Maharashtra.

In concluding this discussion of early caste contests in nineteenth century Maharashtra it might be useful to note that the ideological parameters within which such contests occurred are being reconceptualised. Caste contests have conventionally been viewed as attempts at sankritisation wherein lower castes accept the ideological principles of the caste system and aspire to the status of

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higher castes by giving up certain customs and practices and accepting the values of the Brahmanical order. Such moves do not critique the caste system or question its ideological moorings but simply create a new hierarchy. An analysis of the ideological underpinning of sanskritisation can be sharpened by arguing that hegemonic ideology works to limit the cultural imagination of the lower orders*! and makes it difficult to radically reconceptualise society. Thus the acceptance of upper-caste/class norms is mandatory for a group seeking upward mobility — it is built into the way caste ideology works and it is this process that we see more evidence of in the history of the caste system. It is only when an onslaught is made on the cultural hegemony of the Brahmanas, and on the ideology of the caste system as conceptualised by the Brahmanas, rather than on the place occupied by them that a real critique of the caste system can be made.

Ill The long-term and more durable consequences of the establishment of British power through its policies took a while to unfold but by the middle of the nineteenth century they were being felt. The creation of a new system of administration, particularly a bureaucracy and a legal system based upon a distinctive system of recruitment to fill its lower rungs, opened up opportunities to particular segments of Maharashtrian society, leading to the emergence of a professional class. This section formed the backbone of the 'middle' class. Entry into these professions was through an English education. Access to education and to the new professions were twin factors in the process of class formation. Economic changes and urbanisation also provided opportunities to certain sections in the formation of new classes. These processes were simultaneously 'open' and closed: while technically open to all castes, making possible mobility and opportunity, they were unequally accessible to different castes and, not infrequently, virtually closed to the lowest among them.

It thus became clear that the breakup of pre-colonial society was not automatically going to work in favour of all sections. This resulted in sharp contests for control over new opportunities. The upper castes, particularly the Brahmanas, attempted to retain their pre-eminent position in society, and middle and lower castes

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attempted to prise open the structure and alter the balance of social forces in their own favour.

In this, Maharashtra was different from Bengal. In Bengal the process of class formation appears broadly to have been an extension of pre-colonial elite groups (which had been more heterogeneous than in Maharashtra) without marked conflict; in Maharashtra the formation of class was accompanied by more obvious tension. The upper castes, particularly the Brahmanas, did ultimately feed into the professional middle class and maintain an unbroken hold on education and government service but this did not occur without opposition. Further, caste contestations came to shape the nature of nationalism: the Brahmanas' attempts to retain their hold over material resources and social pre-eminence required also their hegemonic control over society and over the reshaping of the future. Throughout the nineteenth century the Brahmanas' virtual monopoly over education (especially in the Poona region) and the professions continued and a firm grip on the national movement during the last quarter of the nineteenth century was one way in which the lower-caste critique of Brahmana power was diffused.

British policies on education in Maharashtra can be traced back to Elphinstone's decision to continue the dakshina to Brahmanas in a modified form after their takeover of the Peshwa territories in the Deccan. Although this was a move to 'conciliate the upper classes'4? it was also hoped that the Brahmanas could ultimately be led away from a study of religious texts to more 'useful' branches of learning such as law and mathematics and via these to western values. In pursuance of these hopes the Bombay government set up the Hindu College in Poona in 1821.

The new form of dakshina was, however, resented by orthodox Brahmanas and a confrontation between them and the British was building up over their educational policy. When the British decided to freeze the dakshina in 1836 the reaction from orthodox

Brahmanas was sharp. A petition signed by 800 shastris and pandits protested against the 'undermining of the moral foundations of Hindu society'.

The government of Bombay, however, hoped to counter the protests of the signatories with a new generation of Brahmanas going through the Poona English School who were expected to support the political and social objectives of the British government.

They were not disappointed. A group of Poona Brahmanas sent in

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

a series of representations in 1850, indicating a division in the ranks of the Brahmanas, and showing that many Brahmanas were anxious to exploit the opportunities British rule was opening up to them.*4

The linking of educational policies with the handling of Brahmanas and Brahmanical learning was a central element of the various moves made by the British between the 1820s and 1860s in Maharashtra. While the British-Indian government wished to transform the nature of learning for the Brahmanas it was not uncomfortable with a special place for them, and more generally the upper castes, in the educational institutions. For example,

Wood, in directing the establishment of universities, stated that the government was to 'place the benefits of education plainly and practically before the higher classes in India'.*°

Of two reasons justifying the limited reach of education the first was the shortage of funds which required maximum effect with minimal investment.*6 A second and more important justification was the anxiety of the British to not upturn the 'social practices of Hinduism where learning was traditionally confined to the higher castes'. As early as 1825 Elphinstone had argued that if the new system of education first took root among the lowest castes it would never spread any further. In his view it was also inconsistent with the British attempt to found the new government on a 'more extended basis'. The 'lowest castes' were the most despised but the were also the 'least numerous of the great divisions of society' .*7

The English school that taught the popular branches of the sciences was envisaged as a school for the children of the upper classes. To prevent a 'mixture of ranks as might prevent the higher order of natives from using the school' no boy was to be admitted until he was approved of by a committee.*8 Thus, apart from the content of learning the question of who it was intended for and who was to be left out were a critical component of educational policies.

From the very outset thus the educational policy of the British was the subject of a variety of contestatory positions.*? Some missionaries were sharply critical of the government's pro-Brahmana policies of material support to Brahmanical knowledge. They supported a more diffused spread of learning to break the monopoly of knowledge in the hands of the Brahmanas, and as a means to break the hold of the Brahmanas upon the rest of society in order to pave the way for the Christianisation of the population. Some missionaries had also found the lowest castes to

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be the best pupils. But since the British administrators were keen to placate the Brahmanas the early facilities of education remained highly restricted. On no account were the British to appear to prefer the lower castes. As Elphinstone put it, while education for the lower castes might put the British at the head of a new class

'superior to the rest in useful knowledge' since they were a minority, despite their new attainments, the British would not be able to 'prefer' them, because this would lead to the upper castes hating and despising the British.*° It must, however, be noted that though the onset of British rule did not usher in a sudden golden age of lower-caste education, indirectly it did bring in some signs of widening educational opportunities through the burgeoning of educational establishments in the hands of Protestant missionaries. Seeing a fertile ground for proselytisation among the lower castes, the missionaries did their utmost to point out that Hinduism had deprived them of their rights in matters of education and religion.?! Although government schools remained restricted the onset of company rule appeared to the lower castes to bring in new opportunities for their advancement. Thus, while the upper castes availed themselves of British government facilities, the lower castes attempted to gain access to similar education through the schools of the missionaries? as Phule did.

The early imbalance in educational opportunities continued throughout the nineteenth century. In 1884, out of 109 students in the Deccan College Poona, 107 were Brahmanas even though the caste constituted only 4 per cent of the population in the region.» Even in Bombay, whose educational and service profile was very different from Poona, there was an overwhelming representation of the upper castes in the college, with Brahmanas comprising more than 50 per cent of the students in 1884.>4 Here, however, the monopoly of the Brahmanas had clearly been mediated by other upper castes such as the Vanis and Prabhus, especially the latter. The Prabhus had a long association with Bombay and with learning skills. They had served both the Portuguese in Bombay and the Peshwas in Poona. As clerks under the East India Company they prospered in Bombay in the 17th and eighteenth centuries." Their monopoly of clerkships in Bombay was so great that their caste name became a synonym for an English

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

Prabhus appear to have grasped the importance of the formal training and they maintained a steady position as a leading community in the Elphinstone College and were better represented than the Brahmanas. However, what is striking is the steady inroads made into this position by the Brahmanas. By the middle of the 1860s the positions had been completely reversed and the Brahmanas now dominated the institution among its Hindu students.°' This pattern in Bombay reflects the manner in which the Brahmanas recovered their social position following the apparent reversal of their fortunes with the collapse of the Peshwai.

Brahmana domination of the institutions of education enabled them to make up their loss of direct political control by continuing to exercise a grip on the administration and they consequently remained the most influential social group in Maharashtra. They thus occupied professional positions in the British administration at all levels far in excess of their proportion in the population as a whole, in India and more specifically in western India.

The concentration of educational opportunities and entry to the civil services among the Brahmanas as well as the dominance this gave them was an important element in the social processes and class formation of nineteenth century Maharashtra. A broad congruence between caste and class was sustained, with the foremost pre-colonial elite group of the Brahmanas feeding directly into the new professional class. The Prabhus too, who had at one time had a virtual monopoly over certain positions in Bombay, continued to be fairly well represented in the professions. A few other castes of Maharashtra also became more visible: the Sutars through entry into company service as clerks, especially in Bombay city, as well as the Sonars. The Sonars became significant not through entry into education and the professions but because of their wealth. Despite their controversial caste status, because of their wealth, a section of them rose to established positions in Bombay society.°° Some individuals among the non-Brahmanas also used the new opportunities in road-building and urbanisation as contractors, as Phule did, to establish themselves economically."

Over the decades this burgeoning class, with its social composition drawn essentially from the upper castes, also reproduced itself, with the largest proportion of students at the college level being the children of government employees and professional men, who, in turn, had been drawn from families

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where it was traditional to serve the government even in pre-colonial times.

The broad congruence between caste and class was a consequence also of the manner in which British policies (which were themselves Janus-faced, both breaking into and able to work with traditional social hierarchies) were devised, set in motion and affected different strata of Indian society. Thus, even as it broke the intellectual 'monopoly' of the Brahmanas by opening doors to "all classes', it created an educated class comprising various castes, and set off occupational and social mobility, as contended by Misra.°!

Because the 'opportunities' provided by the British were both open and closed, these new economic and social processes were generated without a radical alteration of the relationship between caste and class, especially because the relationship between these and property was not altered by the colonial state. The social power of the Brahmanas was therefore considerable.

In order to understand the social and economic place of the Brahmanas as the dominant elite group in the second half of the nineteenth century we need to outline the relationship of the different components of the community to class, one as a professional middle class and the other as a group in property relations.°2 The two are of course interrelated and the caste contestations as well as the reassembling of power were contingent upon the interpenetrative nature of the two working together.

However, because the Brahmanas, in their capacity as the professional middle class, shaped public opinion visibly during the second half of the nineteenth century in the Deccan it is useful to focus on them.

The economic profile of the Brahmanas in the Bombay presidency including the Poona Deccan indicates a close connection with land as rent receivers and cultivators (but never as agricultural labourers). According to the 1911 census, in the three major subdivisions among the Brahmanas, Chitpavans, Deshasthas and Gauda Saraswat Brahmanas, 20.5 per cent, 20.8 per cent and 21.0 per cent respectively were rent receivers. In the Deccan area a substantial section of the inamdars were Brahmanas who held these inam rights due to their position as village accountants or priests or because they had been military feudatories under the Peshwas.

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

Not surprisingly, they dominated the Deccan Sardars' and the Inamdars' associations.°4 The 1911 census further indicates that 25.6 per cent, 23.1 per cent and 17.1 per cent of the Chitpavan,

Deshastha and Gauda Saraswat Brahmanas were cultivators. In the case of the Chitpavan Brahmanas whose history during the nineteenth century has been well documented, the traditional association with land did not diminish through entry into the professions but appears to have intensified. The Bombay Gazetteer reported that the professional classes had a marked fondness for land investment and that lawyers and government servants were among those buying lands.°° Further, this fondness for land had undoubtedly increased under British rule. This buying spree would have added to the rentier aspect of Brahmana association with land.°" The 1920s anti-landlord movement was synonymous with an anti-Brahmana movement in Ratnagiri, the home of the Chitpavan Brahmanas who held most of the lucrative tenures.®®

Most importantly, the Brahmanas' penetration into administration, especially revenue administration, enabled them to work the new land revenue laws to their advantage.

Brahmanas as a prominent element in the commercial bourgeoisie." However, this prominence was confined to the Deccan — in Bombay it was Parsis, Gujaratis and Marwaris who dominated trade and moneylending.

It was in the professions that the Brahmanas were most visible in the nineteenth century. In the first decade of the twentieth century 13.6 per cent of the Chitpavans were dependent upon incomes from professions.'' Significantly, opportunities provided by education and the use of English education Were grasped by the less prosperous sections of the Brahmanas.'

Thus, while the Brahmanas were not homogeneous as a community, stratification within the caste was being transformed through upward social mobility via entry into the professions. This, in turn, consolidated

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the position of the community as a whole in relation to the rest of society. The family histories of the Chitpavan Brahmanas indicate that as the century progressed the earlier antagonism of the community to the British gave way and by the end of the century government service was the favoured occupation."

The material position of the Brahmanas in land, trade and government service was enhanced by their dominance in certain key professions such as law, teaching and particularly in journalism."4

Brahmanas accounted for about two-thirds of all editors listed between 1901 and 1921. The newspapers edited by the Chitpavans accounted for half the circulation of Marathi newspapers throughout this period. As the print media expanded, Brahmanical control over communication was a crucial means of moulding public opinion, in advancing their point of view and marginalising the voices of other sections. Together with the spreading-out of Brahmanas, through their growing numbers in the professions which took them across a wide area, they gained enormous influence over the countryside. The power they wielded was different from the kind they had exercised during the Peshwai when they had constituted the state; now in the nineteenth century in a new situation, it was a great deal more indirect, but it remained impressive as they continued to dominate public life.

IV The continuation of a broad varna-varga congruence (even as social relations in nineteenth century Maharashtra changed) was the basis for a powerful non-Brahmana movement, the earliest of its kind in colonial India. The attempts at altering the status of castes culminated in desperate moves by various non-Brahmana castes to be recorded as Kshatriya or Vaishya during the censuses of 1891 and 1901.'° But the real edge to caste contestations came not with individual castes seeking upward mobility but with a coherent and cogent critique of the caste system itself. This too was not entirely unknown. What was new were the arguments in the critique and the emergence of a political movement against pre-colonial social relations, perceived as surviving fairly unaltered even under colonial rule, in the work of Phule and his associates in the second half of the nineteenth century. The two processes were linked to each other

— sometimes castes were involved in both. There were ideas which

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender 65 were shared in the two processes and a mutual feeding into each other but there were some crucial distinctions that need to be noted. These differences made for vastly differing gender ideologies and political consequences. In Phule's'® conceptualisation of caste a definitive turning-point in the history of caste contestations was reached. Phule's rejection of the process of sanskritisation, broke through the ritual idiom of caste movements which had worked within the parameters of Brahmanic ideology. This rejection was not confined to the religious sphere, as had largely been the case with earlier critiques of the caste system (such as those expressed by the Bhakti sants), but was more emphatically based on exploiting existing social and economic relations. Using a conflict approach to an analysis of society which pitted the Brahmanas, as upholders of an unequal social system, against those who were oppressed, humiliated and exploited, Phule represents a unique moment in the nineteenth century analysis of the caste system. He saw caste unambiguously as an unacceptable system for the lower castes; in this his analysis was in sharp contrast to the writing of upper-caste intellectuals whose analysis of caste, in the main, was marked by a false and forced consensus.

Phule focused in particular on caste as a cultural hegemonic system which he elaborated with considerable skill. Further, because he successfully broke the hold of Brahmanic ideology upon the explanatory structure of social relations he was unique too in his approach to gender. He alone, among nineteenth century social reformers, was able to stand outside Brahmanical patriarchy and, although gender was not a central factor in his analysis of caste and the reproduction of inequality, his rejection of the caste system and of Brahmanic Hinduism enabled him to adopt a more radical approach to gender inequality than any of his contemporaries.

It may be useful at this point to outline some of the elements that made Phule's innovative approach to caste and gender possible.

Omvedt has pointed out that the new challenge from below represented by Phule and the non-Brahmana cultural movement in the nineteenth century was distinctive. That is, though themes from the past were used, unlike the leaders of the cultural revolts of earlier times Phule's handling of the past refused to be absorbed into the usual processes of Brahmanic Hinduism. The context of colonialism, both in terms of its impact on social and economic relations, the emergence of new social and professional classes, and

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its relation to caste as well as in terms of new ideologies, was the determining factor in the critique of caste in nineteenth century

Maharashtra.""

The repertoire of arguments made available at this time through missionary polemics, against the inequalities of Hinduism, was probably an important input into Phule's formulation of caste. A more significant input came from the criticism of religion in the French enlightenment and the political thought of France and England in the post-revolution decades. Thomas Paine, in particular, with his emphasis on the natural rights of individuals and the need to subject traditional institutions to free discussion and criticism, contributed to developing the critical arguments of Phule and his colleagues. The ideas of Paine were useful in staving off the 'attractions' of Christianity. Following the arguments in the 'Age of Reason' Phule and his friends rejected conversion to Christianity advocated by some of his contemporaries."®

Phule's critique of Hindu society, like that of some other Hindu radicals, cannot thus be directly attributed to Christian missionaries or to European radicals but to a simultaneous reinforcement and counterbalancing of one with the other. Phule drew from many sources but did so selectively and this enabled him to resist seeking religious tradition or authority of any kind. However, the most critical input into the critique was derived from Phule's personal experience (and his awareness of others) of the routine humiliation heaped by the Brahmanas upon the lower castes. This is more than evident from his biography and his writings. These are replete with examples of such experiences which form the basis of his critique of the material and ideological power of the Brahmanas over the lower castes.'?

The reconceptualisation of the caste system from a lower-caste point of view, shifting the attention from social mobility within the caste system to a rejection of the system itself was clearly the work of Phule and his colleagues in the non-Brahmana movement. The earliest published work in Marathi written from this standpoint was

Tukaram Tatya Padaval's Jatibhed Vivekasar (A Critique of Caste Divisions) (1861). Padaval was a Bhandari, a caste of toddy-tappers in Maharashtra. Phule was closely connected with the publication of this work which argues the arbitrary nature of the caste system.

The whole edifice of caste and notions of caste purity are regarded as based on a delusion, consciously promoted by the Brahmanas,

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender 67 and the misplaced caste pride of other high-ranking groups which are thus complicitous in the Brahmanic ideology.®°

The most interesting aspect of Padaval's argument is his account of the attempts at upward mobility by a range of social groups using the Kshatriya and Vaishya models of sanskritisation and the strong

Brahmana resistance to these attempts. Padaval notes further that the decline or rise in status was directly related to the fluctuations in the political power of various elite groups such as the Marathas.

He also points to the pragmatism of the Brahmanas on the grant of status to an aspirant caste group; in emulation of Shivaji, they granted Kshataye status to the Marathas who had been regarded as Shudras earlier.*! The awareness of the long-standing disputes over the issue of caste status reflected in Padaval's work suggests that these caste tensions fed directly into the non-Brahmana movement.

Arguments such as Padaval's were carried forward in Phule's view of caste; he strongly distanced himself from the attempts of the Kunbis to identify with Kshatriyas by wearing the sacred thread and as Marathas by seeking the right to Vedokta rituals.8? He argued that such moves obscured the realisation that all social divisions were part of the 'same engine of social oppression'. He was particularly critical of the double moves such strategies for higher status entailed since identifying with the higher castes

(and accepting the premises of the caste system) implied a distancing from other castes regarded as low in the hierarchy. Phule regarded these moves as falling into the trap of Brahmanism and as a result ensuring the continuation of the division of the oppressed among themselves®4 It was Phule's attempt to make the lower castes conscious of the injustice and inequality of the caste system as a whole. For this reason, unlike other leaders of the non-Brahmana movement who used the argument of Kshatriya identity and Maratha status as a conscious strategy in recruiting support among rural audiences,

Phule was extremely cautious in his handling of the term 'Maratha', and questions of the 'true' identity of the Marathas. Instead, he posited a basic contradiction between the Brahmana elite and the mass of cultivating and labouring castes, and in this way he pointed to the existence of a 'fused community of oppressed' which transcended the fragmentation of the labouring groups into cultivating Kunbis and untouchable Mangs and Mahars. This community, the Bahujan Samaj, was held together also by their

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recognition and rejection of both the social categories of conventional Hindu beliefs and the religious authority of its guardians.®° Phule's understanding of caste, as inextricably linked with Brahmanic Hinduism, underpins the entire body of his work from the 1850s through to the 1880s. He skilfully drew up an analysis locating the nature and sources of Brahmanic power especially with regard to the Brahmanas' monopoly over knowledge and the control this gave them over the rest of society. The monopoly of knowledge systems, available only to the Brahmanas in traditional society, was being extended, in Phule's understanding, through the appropriation of educational facilities even in colonial times. The power these prerogatives had given the Brahmanas in the administration both in the Peshwai and in the colonial state was also crucial in their continued hold over society. And although he did not devote the same energy to the material contradiction between Brahmanas and non-Brahmanas, cultivators and labour

(between those who labour and those who do not), between the Bhatji-Shetji and the Bahujan Samaj, Phule is one of the first to outline the link between ideological power and its material basis.

Phule's criticism is sharp since he regards the social and political values of Brahmanism as fundamentally distorted. He and other

'radical non-Brahmanas of his time perceived the sacred texts of Hinduism, which legitimised the social practices of Hindu sociery, as the critical source of control in the hands of the Brahmanas.°°

Throughout his work entitled Gulamgiri Phule stressed that the practices of Hindu religion were indefensible because they violated human rights. Further, he attempted to conceptualise a case of natural human rights for all societies and perceived a basic affinity between all oppressed people of the world, whether as blacks in America or low castes in India.®"

A notable dimension of his attack on the social practices of Hinduism was his conviction that the Hindu religion was specifically the world-view of the Brahmanas. This world-view served their interests not only in matters of religious authority but also in establishing their secular power and cultural hegemony over others. Further, as the lower castes lived and worked within the political, social and ritual relationships laid down by the Brahmanas, they unwittingly succumbed to the interests of the Brahmanas themselves. In one of his early works, the Traitya Ratna

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

or Third Eye, Phule put forth the view that the Hindu religion represented both an ideological imposition upon the lower castes and, through the insistence on numerous rituals and ceremonies advantageous to the Brahmanas, a cause of their material impoverishment.®® Phule's distinctive analysis of caste marked him off from the understanding of even the most radical of the liberal

Brahmana social reformers.

He was furthest from their understanding in the explanation he provided for the origins of the caste system and in his generally unorthodox handling of the past.

Phule's exploration of the past to explain an inegalitarian present in which the lower-caste toiling masses were subjected to the power of the non-labouring upper castes, particularly the Brahmanas, was focused upon two moments: the first dealt with the origins of a system of inequality in the ancient past and the second with the more recent history of Maharashtra. Phule's handling of these moments was so unorthodox that it was violently contested by orthodox Brahmana writers, accustomed as they were to a monopoly of writing history.®?

For Phule, unlike contemporary reformers who traced the first colonial encounter in India to the British (and sometimes to the Muslims), the most significant colonial encounter in Indian history was the one that occurred in the pre-historic past — that of the Aryans. He thus turned the colonial question around by depicting the contemporary Brahmanas as the real 'aliens' who had conquered the indigenous peoples and subordinated them by usurping the rightful power and property of the original inhabitants.?? The conquerors then imposed their religion as an instrument of social control in order to keep the subordinated peoples in a state of permanent subjugation. The invention of the caste system was thus a critical instrument by which the Brahmanas concealed their original act of usurpation and ensured the perpetuation of their own privileged position."! a An aspect of Phule's analysis of Aryan conquest and of the origin of the caste system that marked him off from other nineteenth century reformers coming to terms with their troubled past, needs to be stressed: his rejection of the term Aryan as 'noble', as _ representing a superior period, a veritable golden age. The idea of a golden age was a pervasive viewpoint shared by conservative scholars and reformers alike outlined in the next section.?? For Phule, however, the 'golden age' of the upper-caste nineteenth

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century writer was instead the moment of great betrayal since it was the occasion for the usurpation of the lands of the original inhabitants. The real golden age had been the pre-Aryan realm of the Kshatriyas under the benign rule of King Bali.?? The figure of Bali was identified in nineteenth century popular culture through proverbs and other symbols with the tillers of soil as also with a 'golden age', a happier idyllic society now lost. Using the radical one of the two interpretations of Bali in which some celebrated his defeat at the hands of Vamana and Brahmanas, and others, especially Shudras, prayed for the restoration of his kingdom because he had taken their part against Vamana and the Brahmanas,

Phule 'carefully organised an account of the hidden history of low castes for them'.4

Shivaji, too, was a key figure in the contest over the past. Phule centre-staged him before Brahmana writers did with his publication of a pavada, a ballad-like form that traditionally described the exploits of heroes. Using an existing tradition, understood in a language familiar to rural audiences, Phule's pavada presented

Shivaji as the leader of Maharashtra's lower castes whose achievements were attributable to the strength of his Shudra and ati-Shudra armies rather than to the intellectual skills of his Brahmana ministers. Rejecting the attempts to project Ramdas as the actual hero of Shivaji's exploits, and as go-Brahmana pratipalak, he warned the lower castes about the attempts of Brahmana teachers to appropriate Shivaji to their cause, as freeing the country from the foreign unbelievers, and filling them with false religious patriotism."

Phule linked the figure of Shivaji with that of King Bali whose mantle Shivaji inherited; thus ancient history was connected to a more recent one with both Bali and Shivaji struggling to protect the land from foreign conquest and Shivaji was assimilated to a much older tradition of non-Brahmana rulers as protectors of the common man. The Shivaji ballad was addressed to a humble audience in order to be of use to Kunbis, Malis, Mangs and Mahars as the ruined Kshatriyas of yore. Phule's version appropriated the central episode in Maharashtra's recent history to the history of those who laboured and those who protected the land. As O'Hanlon argues, through this alternative to Brahmana-centred interpretations, Phule hoped to provide an ys for the lower castes with its own tradition of social leadership.'

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

In reinterpreting the past, Phule was deeply conscious of the need to counter the Brahmanical version of the past as a means to prise the control of knowledge from the hands of the Brahmanas who had been responsible for erasing the history of their usurpation and subjection, and for legitimising the iniquitous social system.

This desire to manipulate knowledge was behind the Brahmanas' attempt to appropriate Shivaji's real project to their own ends. For these reasons the contest over history was fierce as history was

'knowledge' about why contemporary society was organised the way it was.?"

Phule's version of history was, not unexpectedly, received with outrage by the predominantly Brahmana press. The Vividhadnyan

Vistaar, for example, reacted with a mixture of hysteria, scorn and contempt for the 'unknown' author who dared to arrogate to himself the skill of a historian. The reviewer of the Shivaji ballad spoke on behalf of all 'Hindus' and stated that to accept it would bring sheer disgrace upon the courageous Shivaji and upon all

Hindu people. Another review of Gulamgiri in the same paper was even more eloquently patronising as it suggested that Phule should consult the Royal Asiatic Society about his derivation of the terms

Mahar and Kshatriya.?® The formation of an accepted canon in history loaded the weights unevenly for an alternative to the canonised version, especially if it came from the likes of Phule.

Many years later Ambedkar recalled the main features of the contested history of Maharashtra and pointed out that the work of non-Brahmana writers would be met with a conspiracy of silence, either by taking no notice of it or by dubbing it useless."

Phule's interpretation of the past was one aspect of the attempt to break the cycle of inequality, Brahmanic ideology and the reproduction of the structure. A more lasting and vital way to do so, in Phule's opinion, was through education since it was the Brahmana's claim to knowledge that enabled him to wield power over others in traditional society. Phule believed that the presence of the British made it possible to overturn the lower-caste exclusion from learning. He was aware of the need to open up educational avenues for them. The urgency to grasp the limited opportunities lay in the realisation that the Brahmanical monopoly over education had continued even during British rule which, in turn, had led to the rise of an administrative elite which had reconsolidated

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Brahmana power. This was an unmitigated disaster for the lower castes and implied the defusing of their revolutionary potential.

Given the centrality of education in Phule's attempt to empower the lower castes and to end the Brahmanic monopoly of learning it is not surprising that his first piece of writing, Traitya Ratna, the Third Eye, was on education; he hoped that it would enable the lower castes to 'see' by providing them with new modes of social perception. Phule was most critical of British policies on education because these had enabled the Brahmanas to retain their monopoly of this vital resource.!

The unfulfilled aspirations of the Kunbis and the castes below them became a central feature of the non-Brahmana contestation of the social processes in nineteenth century Maharashtra.

Appearing before the Hunter Commission in 1884, Phule, who was spearheading the non-Brahmana movement, argued that it was the ignorance of the British government that had led it to support policies which strengthened the hold of the Brahmanas over the rest of society. Access to civil service and the liberal professions such as law, the two avenues to progress open to 'all' people, was through schools and colleges set up by the British under the diffusionist theory of education which had actually never worked as 'diffusion' because of the selfishness of the Brahmanas. According to Phule, instead of disseminating the education they had acquired among the lower castes the Brahmanas had exploited their positions to monopolise the civil service and liberal professions. Phule demanded the introduction of compulsory primary education in the villages and special incentives to lower castes in the institutions of higher learning.!°! He further argued that since the bulk of its revenues were from a tax paid by the peasants, the government was morally obliged to focus its attention upon the Kunbis rather than upon the Brahmanas who only constituted a 'minority'.

Phule's critique was supported by an analysis of the situation as it obtained not only in Maharashtra but also elsewhere, where the Brahmanas were defending their monopoly over education and ensuring the exclusion of the lowest castes such as Mangs and Mahars from it.!°* Where, and when, schools were thrown open to the lower castes the higher castes fiercely 'defended' their privileges. The 1901 census reported that in South India, high castes would not allow children of low-caste origin to sit within the same building. When efforts at equality were enforced, schools

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender 73 remained closed for years and there were frequent disturbances of the peace. The contests over educational privileges even led to the high castes burning the crops of the lower castes who dared to send their children to school.!™ Given these conflicts, it is not surprising that even as late as 1931 only 2.9 per cent of the Mahars, 2 per cent of the Chambhars, and 1.6 per cent of the Mangs were literate, 1% Clearly these contests and social tensions were not confined to educational opportunities, or the violation of spaces which the upper castes regarded as their prerogative, but to the eventual openings that education implied in terms of positions in the administration. Faced with an insensitive government and a hostile society Phule spent a great deal of energy in the early years of his public career in setting up schools for Mangs, Mahars and women, becoming the leading crusader for democratisation of opportunities in Poona.

Phule's belief in the power of education to liberate the subordinated and introduce them to new modes of social perception could have been the starting-point for his interest in reforms for women. He was only 21 when he opened his first school in Poona in 1848: significantly, it was for low-caste untouchable girls.!° By initiating his own educational institutions with a school for girls, Phule was making a statement on the lowest among the low in Hindu society: the low-caste woman. In setting it up in Poona, still the centre of conservative Brahmanas, Phule was also throwing an open challenge to them and their views (on banning learning for the low castes and women) which had restricted knowledge and made it an instrument of power.

The importance of the project of education was evident in the arguments Phule and his colleagues advanced for it: the failure to educate women was the prime cause of the impoverishment of contemporary Indian society.!°° The link between the decline of education and the decline of a people was not unique to Phule but was a common argument of nineteenth century reformers. What was distinctive however was the rationale for female education.

While for the upper caste or middle class social reformer it was to provide fitting 'helpmeets' for the new class of men, for Phule education was the third eye — the instrument of a new mode of understanding social relations. Further, this was as essential for

74 REWRITING HISTORY

low-caste women as it was for low-caste men. Phule pinpointed this in a speech while castigating traditional attitudes:

In their opinion, women should forever be kept in obedience, should not be given any knowledge, should not be well educated, should not know about religion (and) should not mix with men...'°"

The potential explosiveness of education for low-caste girls was evident in an essay written by Muktabai, a fourteen-year-old Mang girl in Phule's school. She had been a student of this school for about three years when she wrote the essay, 'About the Griefs of the Mangs and the Mahars' ('Mang Maharachya Dukha Visaiy'),'°° describing the humiliating conditions under which the Mangs and Mahars existed. It is clear from Muktabai's essay that it is mainly her experience as a Mang, rather than as a Mang girl in particular, that informs her understanding of dominance and power. What is also evident is that Muktabai represents the best example of Phule's belief that a special vision, a traitya ratna, would be the outcome of education and would have the means to strip the falsity of Brahmanic ideology. It enabled her to proclaim, "Let that religion where only one person is privileged and the rest deprived, perish from the earth, and let it never enter our minds to be proud of such a religion.'!"

Muktabai's brief essay dwells on themes which, in varying degrees, inform nineteenth century non-Brahmana writing: the first is an acute awareness of the Peshwai as a period of extraordinarily arbitrary power for the Brahmanas and thus an unmediated time of oppression for the low castes. Their hold over the administration, especially the revenue administration (a gift of the Peshwai), had given the Brahmanas a unique control over the labouring peoples.

Second, the prohibition of knowledge for the low castes was the work of the Brahmanas. Third, she dwells on the theme of dispossessing the ancestors of the lower castes of their lands and the distribution of material assets and power between the Brahmanas and others — the Brahmanas as revenue officers and the other castes in degrading occupations such as the barber 'who has to go about shaving the heads of widows'. Fourth, Muktabai is extremely insightful about the way Brahmanic ideology works to create a complex structure of hierarchy where the low castes themselves are graded into less polluting and more polluting, with the former having power over the latter.

The fragmentation of the

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender DD underprivileged was an important theme of Phule's writing but Muktabai's inclusion of relations between Mangs and Mahars in her short essay indicates an awareness of the multiple processes involved in the humiliation of untouchables — processes which had survived despite the formal cessation of Brahmanic power with the end of the Peshwai.

It is only when Muktabai describes the inhuman consequences of untouchability that her insights into the experiences of low-caste women are evident. Beginning with an attack on the psychological and material dimensions of untouchability and the grief and poverty it entails, Muktabai addresses the Brahmanas:

Oh learned pandits wind up the selfish prattle of your hollow wisdom and listen to what I have to say, when Our women give birth to babies they do not even have a roof over their heads. How they suffer rain and cold! Try to think about it from your own experience. Suppose the women suffered from puerperal disease, from where could they have found money for the doctor or medicine?

Was there ever any doctor among you who was human enough to treat people free of charge?!!° Another vulnerable group like low-caste women were low-caste children whose humiliation began in early childhood itself:

The Mang and Mahar children never lodge a complaint even if the Brahmin children throw stones at them and injure them seriously....11"

Muktabai's essay ends abruptly, 'Oh God! What agony is this! I will burst into tears if I write more about this injustice.'!'? Even so, the anguished Muktabai understood and rejected the existing social order and provided a scathing critique of Brahmanical power in nineteenth century Maharashtra. The newly acquired skills of literacy for this untouchable woman had made it possible to question, in print, the most 'sacred' person in the social hierarchy, and reject unequivocally his 'knowledge' and his authority.

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The theme of knowledge, its closely-guarded nature in caste society, and its potential for reversing the low status of the lower castes is evident also in Savitribai Phule's letter to her husband

Jyotiba, written in 1856, in which she describes a conversation with her brother. Away at her parental home to recover from an illness,

Savitribai spiritedly defended her activities in Poona where she taught Mangs and Mahars. "The lack of learning is nothing but gross bestiality', she told her brother. 'It was the possession of knowledge that gave the Brahmanas their superior status. 'Learning has a great value. One who masters it loses his lowly status and achieves the higher one',!!° she added, rebutting her brother's plea that she and Jyotiba should follow the customs of their caste and the dictates of the Brahmanas rather than take on different social roles from those allotted to them.

Muktabai's and Savitribai's writings represent one aspect of Phule's reformist intervention in relation to women: the focus on the education of low-caste women and their empowerment through it; the other arena of intervention was the humiliation imposed upon Brahmana widows.!!* While Phule did not dwell noticeably upon upper-caste women within their own families, the widow's place at the receiving end of Brahmanical patriarchy (which was beginning to feature in reformist discourse as we shall see in the next section) became the centre of some characteristically dramatic moves by him. The structural relationship between the low castes, subjected to the power of the Brahmanas, and the Brahmana widow, subjected to the power of Brahmanical patriarchy, was implicitly recognised in Phule's reformist work. The material and sexual consequences of enforced widowhood were responsible for a large number of such young women becoming pregnant and having to hide their condition for fear of excommunication. Phule and Savitribai provided them support by setting up an orphanage for the children born to Brahmana widows. In his forthright manner

Phule published handbills proclaiming the setting-up of an orphanage to prevent infanticide, thus picking on one of the most vulnerable spots in Brahmanism, the linchpin of upper-caste gender codes, enforced widowhood and its consequences. With this, Phule forced into the open a problem that the Brahmanas would rather have dealt with in the customary manner — by pretending that it did not exist — or through punitive measures such as ghatasphot, a symbolic death ritual for those who were outcasted, leading to

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender il the complete social boycott of the widow. More routinely, the humiliation of widows was compounded by enforced tonsure.

Phule is popularly credited with spearheading a barbers' strike. where they refused to perform the customary tonsure of widows.!}5

While Phule devoted considerable attention to enforced widowhood among upper-caste women he was conscious of the differences among women based on caste and their place in the system of production. In the Shetkaryaca Asud, for example, he described the hardships experienced by labouring women when he contrasted this with the relative ease of the lives of Brahmana women.!!¢ Brahmana women laboured at home, and were subject only to the power of Brahmana men; women of the lower castes laboured at home as well as in the fields. They were subject to a double control, from upper-caste men and from men of their families. In the last decade of his life Phule's understanding of women's oppression changed somewhat: he argued that they were conditioned by a structure of relations that we might recognise as akin to patriarchy. This understanding was expressed when Phule publicly defended both Ramabai and Tarabai Shinde; in Ramabai's case he mounted an attack on Brahmanism, in which much of the high-caste woman's oppression was located. In Tarabai's case he went further, as he was critical of his own compatriots in the non-Brahmana movement with regard to recognising women's subordination.

Phule's defence of Tarabai is most significant. As a non-Brahmana woman she had taken a public stand in her work, Stri-Purusha

Tulana (1882),''" against women's subordination and had shocked some of the non-Brahmana activists because of her indictment of forms of patriarchy among Kunbis and other non-Brahmana castes.

Phule's intervention was thus extremely important. It was a recognition that the non-Brahmana movement had neglected the need for an analysis of gender. Phule's reaction to Bhalekar's criticism of Tarabai was as fierce as his critique of Brahmanism.!18

The traditional Indian family system was based on a double standard of morality. There was an urgent need to break down the authoritarian structure within the family and build a new and egalitarian relationship between men and women, leading to social equality.

Some of these heightened concerns are evident in Phule's last work, Sarvajanik Satyadharma, where he replaced the term manus

(man) with sarva ekander stri purush (every woman and man) and in the marriage promises of the Satyashodhak weddings where the

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groom admitted that he could never experience women's suffering, but vowed to give his bride full rights."!?

Phule's vision of a radical democratic society was his answer to traditional social relations where the suppression of the lower castes existed along with that of women. Finally, even though his concern for gender equality did not receive the same focused attention as caste, in Phule's conceptualisation the future of democratic society was to be based on a new set of relations linking equality, labour and education together for both exploited men of the lower castes and oppressed women of all castes. ayy From the preceding discussion, it is evident that the history of the nineteenth century in this region is the history of the challenge to Brahmana dominance, the reconstruction of this dominance and the tensions generated by this challenge. At this point it is important also to take account of the development of differences among Brahmanas. Although capable of acting unitedly in support of their material position the Bramanas were not homogeneous.

This is evident from their response to the social changes engendered by the documented history of the second half of the nineteenth century in the Maharashtra Deccan. Under considerable stress throughout the century, the community was split into an articulate minority advocating certain limited social and cultural changes, and an orthodox majority acting militantly in defence of an unaltered tradition. This internal stress within the community lasted in different forms throughout the century and into the next, forming

'class' segments who shared a similar material relationship but responding in contradictory ways to social and cultural changes then under way. Among the two main class segments, the one pushing the reform agenda attempted to become culturally and politically the dominant force in society;!*° equally the larger and more strident segment which resisted reform also resisted the attempt of the former to shape the identity of the class as a whole.

It is striking that, throughout, gender played a crucial role in the internal struggles within the community and in other communities similarly facing internal stresses. These struggles coalesced around the larger cross-community upper caste elites of Bombay and the Deccan forming the region's 'middle class' which was itself split

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender 79 into two major segments. Within the larger body of the Brahmanas a section with access to English education and with membership of the emerging professional class, sometimes characterised as the 'new

Brahmanas',!"! represented the winds of change in the community; they were the first evidence of the cultural and social crisis being experienced by the community. Their first move was to seek a shift in the deployment of the dakshina funds from Sanskrit learning to useful, modern western studies.!?? The group advocating this position came to be called Young Poona. The new Brahmanas spearheaded a fairly modest critique of Hinduism in the 1830s, 40s and 50s, very different from the full-scale attack mounted by Phule during the 1870s and 80s. Representative of this trend were Gopal

Hari Deshmukh, Bal Shastri Jambhekar and Krishna Shastri Chiplunkar.

Bal Shastri Jambhekar was among the first Hindus to generate a debate through the press on the momentous social changes by setting up, in 1832, the Anglo-Marathi newspaper Darpan in Bombay. The failures of Hindu society to meet the challenges thrown up by British rule was one of the central themes of the debates in the newspapers, where the need for an expansion of India's intellectual horizons and for a revaluation of her traditional beliefs was advocated.!*? Gopal Hari Deshmukh, who wrote under the assumed name of Lokahitawadi, used the Prabhakar to make it the main mouthpiece of early reformist opinion in western India.

The newpaper mounted a critique of ascriptive values in Hinduism, the privileges of Brahmanas, and the devaluation of women and the lower castes. There have been attempts to characterise these ideas as derivative of Christian missionary propaganda!' but it is important to note that what the reformers were doing was to detach certain ideas from specific Christian beliefs and apply these to the issues they took up.!*? As we shall see, they were defenders of a reformed Hinduism and were strongly opposed to conversions.

One of the lesser known but significant representatives of its reformist attitude was Krishna Shastri Chiplunkar, son of a temple priest who had been a student in the Sanskrit college. Appointed a professor of Marathi at the same college, he risked outcasting along with two other pandits by supporting the entry of non-Brahmana students being suggested by the government although almost no non-Brahmana was interested in Sanskrit studies.!*° It was Krishna

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Shastri Chiplunkar's view that old tradition could only preserve itself by adapting to changes in a new environment.

The criticism of Brahmanical ritual practices' featuring in the early debates of the reformers and the challenge to the orthodoxy's purity principles culminated in a brief and disastrous early experiment of setting up something like a secret society. Hindu reformers in Bombay, led by students and ex-students of the Elphinstone College (roughly at this time the institution was headed by a rationalist English principal who was the bane of Christian missionaries), set up the Paramahansa Mandali. The Mandali believed that caste divisions, idol-worship and enforced widowhood were wrong. This organisation broke caste taboos by eating food prepared by low-castes Hindus.

Knowing how 'provocative' this act would be, the Mandali decided to keep its activities secret till its membership grew to 500 when it would be strong enough to withstand a counter-attack. The attempt at secrecy was unsuccessful; reports of its rumoured activities circulated in the press and in 1860 when the secret membership list was made public in the press the group was abruptly terminated.

The collapsed Mandali members made a climbdown and acknowledged that they had been as 'excessive' as the orthodoxy they had sought to challenge.!?7

The ignominious end of the Mandali was a lesson to the 'radicals' among the Brahmanas since its experience had not been particularly cushioned, even in cosmopolitan Bombay where the Brahmanas were important but did not dominate, as they did in Poona. In Poona the orthodoxy was much more firmly entrenched.

Poona was also more homogeneous and attacks on the caste system never really took off. Nevertheless, for a brief period the liberals among the Brahmanas and early non-Brahmana reformers managed to work together. This collaboration was focused essentially around education, with a number of schools being set up in Poona. During the latter years of the 1850s the collaboration began to collapse as Phule rejected the paternalism of the Brahmanas, and the latter began to turn more inward with an increasing anxiety about the threat to their identity from Christian missionary activities.

!28

The complex location of the 'liberal' reformist Brahmanas wedged between orthodox Brahmanas, Christian missionaries and their own unformed ideas was evident in the case of Narayan

Seshadri, a Deshashta Brahmana who converted to Christianity in

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

1843. Apart from anger at the conversion, controversy surrounded the issue of Narayan Seshadri's 12-year-old younger brother who had stayed with Narayan at a mission in Bombay and had therefore been polluted. The question of his pollution triggered off a debate

— while the reformers argued that the boy could be readmitted to caste following the prescribed rituals, the orthodox section in the city comprising Brahmanas, their priests and the sanskritising

Prabhus under their Shetia leader argued that this was unacceptable.

While the matter was sent up to the Shankaracharya for arbitration, the reformist Brahmanas, Jambhekar and his supporters, had to perform purificatory rites before being accepted back into caste.

Significantly, controversies such as this and those relating to widow remarriage tended to reinforce caste identities on both sides.!*? The potential threat to caste and religious identity tightened social and religious bonds and reaffirmed the encapsulated identities of castes against the integrative urban pressures, even in Bombay.

The early contradictions among the Brahmanas over issues of culture and caste norms in the face of social challenges between those who advocated reform and those who resisted it (and those who were confused) coalesced in the issue of the widow remarriage campaign of the 1860s.!°° Concern over the problems of enforced widowhood in the case of very young girls went back to the Peshwai, as the reformer C.Y.

Chintamani noted in his reconstruction of the issue at the turn of the nineteenth century.

The cause remained alive in a desultory way through its championing by individuals such as Subbaji Bapu Sastri, a Telugu

Brahmana who published a pamphlet in 1837, and an anonymous 'learned Brahmin of Nagpore'. The latter was encouraged by the former to stand forth as a 'champion of the females of his caste' and to point out the evils and degradation caused by the unnatural law prohibiting remarriage of widows.'*! Two marriages of widows took place in 1853 and 1854 respectively.!°? This was before Vidyasagar championed the Widow Remarriage Bill in 1856 and published the famous pamphlets that provided textual sanction for remarriage which sparked off a stormy debate as the issue was taken up seriously by the educated in western India.

VI Throughout the nineteenth century the low status of women as

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exemplified by the plight of the child widow, condemned to a life of enforced celibacy, became the subject of a highly visible and widespread discussion. In the first half of the century attention was concentrated on the custom of sati, but with its abolition in 1829 attention shifted to coerced celibacy of upper-caste Hindu widows, for while Act XXVII of 1829 saved women from a 'compulsive death, it did not grant them the right to a fruitful entrance into life'.'33 In Bengal the issue generated a major debate, conducted through the print medium, which made for a veritable -'battle of the books'. Learned scholars in the fray were accompanied by more popular writers of essays and derisive verse who responded to arguments put forward by Vidyasagar to support the case for Shastric approval for widow remarriage. The passage of the enabling law in 1856 making it 'possible' for widows to marry did not, by any means, exhaust the debate which carried on through the rest of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in different centres.

This debate and the various stages in the movement for widow marriage have been fairly well documented, including a detailed analysis of the debate in western India.'34 For our purposes what is important is to dwell on the issues that were highlighted regarding widowhood and the manner in which some of the issues tied in with the earlier conceptualisation of widowhood even as they contested enforced celibacy for widows.!?°

An early and rare outlining of the relationship between the miseries of widowhood and the propertylessness of the widow had been made by Rammohan Roy in his tract on sati. Roy pointed out that the propertyless widow had three options — to slave for others, walk the paths of unrighteousness, or die on the funeral pyre of her husband.!3° With the abolition of sati the discussion on widowhood quite naturally moved on to other aspects, but what is interesting to note is how limited this discussion was and how little it focused on the material dimensions of widowhood among the high castes. What is striking also is to see the difference in the writing and analysis of the men, reformers and traditionalists — even men in authority in the colonial government — on the one hand, and on the other, the women, especially the widows themselves, when they began to write in the late nineteenth century.

While the men tended to outline the dangerous consequences of enforced widowhood, dealing at length with the repressed sexuality of widows and its disastrous effects upon society, the women

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

showed considerable concern for the existential conditions of widowhood. Enforced celibacy, the distortion caused by it as perceived by the reformers, or the dead husband's continued claim over his wife's sexuality as supported by the traditionalists, remained the central focus of men's concerns. These concerns were extensions of the issue of the sexual and social death of the widow in the Brahmanic conceptualisation of widowhood, reflected in its symbolic structure. Rituals included the tonsure of the widow, which may be read as a renunciation of sexuality or even as castration, marking the cessation of her sexual existence.!3"? The undertone to the widow remarriage movement was the anxiety about the unchannelled sexuality of the widow. This went along with the humanitarian rhetoric of the need to alleviate the miseries of the child widow.

The management of female sexuality after the death of the husband had figured centrally in the discussion on sati and it extended into the debate on widow remarriage, but, significantly, was used by opposing groups; in the first case it was used by conservatives to support sati and in the second by reformers to support widow remarriage. The conservatives had quoted the Shastric position on the widow's sexuality using the commentary of Hareet and argued, 'As long as a woman shall not burn herself after her husband's death she will be subject to transmigration in the female form (and) she will fall into vice. This way the husband can rest assured that she will remain virtuous' .!48

In overt contrast to this position and as early as 1841 (well before the formal move to legislate for widow remarriage) an anonymous

'learned Brahmana of Nagpore' in outlining the case for the second marriages of 'infant' widows, used a mixture of arguments, but began by turning the Shastric position on its head by evoking a different Shastric norm for women. He argued that the prohibition against the second marriage of widows was highly unwise because first, it disappointed the 'palpable purpose of the Creator' in having sent women into the world, i.e., to bear children; second, because inevitably it led to great moral depravity and vice on the part of the widow; third, because it inevitably caused a 'frightful amount of infanticide and abortion'; fourth, because the maintenance of these widows in an 'honourable and virtuous course of life' caused a 'ceaseless' though 'fruitless' anxiety to their parents and parents-in-law; and fifth, because these widows inevitably 'rendered

84 REWRITING HISTORY

corrupt and vicious themselves by the hard and unnatural laws operating against them cannot be prevented from corrupting and destroying the honour and virtue of all other women with whom they associate'.!°? For all these reasons the second marriage of widows was not just advisable but necessary.

The petition to legalise widow marriage submitted to the government from a section of the people in Bengal was likewise motivated by concerns about the problem of sustaining the virtue of the widow. Sympathetic to the widow's position because of the 'unnatural quality of celibacy', it warned of its harmful consequences to society. Enforced celibacy, 'cruel and unnatural in itself, was further 'highly prejudicial to the interests of morality' and was otherwise 'fraught with the most mischievous consequences to society' according to the petitioners.!#° In arguing for widow marriage reformers also often pointed to the relationship between widowhood and prostitution. The reformers suggested that as the young child widows grew up into full womanhood they created a social problem of some magnitude because of their prepensty to fall into 'illicit relationships' and thereafter into prostitution. i Such views were evident also in the government position. In moving the bill to present the rationale for widow marriage, J.P.

Grant laid the greatest stress upon the immorality which enforced widowhood produced upon society. This was likely to evoke a more positive response from all quarters than his sympathy for the horrors of brahmacharya upon little us which J.P. Grant stated that he was committed to changing.!*"

The anxiety about the widows' propensity to fall prey to their passions and their inability to live up to the enforced brahmacharya was linked to a widespread belief among nineteenth century men that female nature could subvert even the most stringent surveillance. A nineteenth century writer cautioned that, however a mother may guard the virtue of her widowed daughter and however forcibly she may inculcate the purity of life and manners it proves but a feeble barrier against the irresistible impulse of passion.

Further, the 'repressed' widow was an immense attraction to male relatives. The excessive sexuality of women, a view deeply entrenched in the Brahmanical texts and didactic literature,!44 was apparent in all the discussions about women in the nineteenth century but was most intensively seen in the age-of-consent debate.

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

It indicates the pervasive continuation of male constructs of female sexuality into the nineteenth century debates on gender issues.

It is interesting to note that while Indian men seemed to worry only about the sensuality 'natural' to women, and the consequences of the nubile widow's repressed sexuality upon society, the British, by and large, perceived the problem of widowhood in the context of the lack of moral control of both men and women, i.e., of Indian society as a whole. Widow remarriage was one solution advocated by them to prevent the widows from getting into trouble in a generally depraved situation. For the British the lax morals of the community would inevitably lead to further lapses on the part of the widows. Justifying the act to legalise widow marriage, a report filed by the India based correspondent of The Times, London, stated, 'In this country, between the tropical climate and a code of manners lax beyond anything Europe can conceive such widows are likely to go wrong. Hindu fathers are well aware of the dangers and heavy dowries will be given to overcome lingering prejudices and secure the family permanently from disgrace'.!4

The anxiety displayed by the British for the moral lapses consequent to the enforced celibacy among upper-caste widows was enhanced by their concern for the effects that such depravity would have upon other women within the home, and through their corruption, the ensuing degeneration of all Hindus. As the education and training of children was consigned to the care of mothers, sisters and aunts, themselves corrupted through contact with widows, the depravity of all Hindus was inevitable according to this view. Tracts were in circulation, sometimes penned by practitioners of medicine, who as specialists had an 'insider's' knowledge of what went on within the cloisters of high-caste Hindu homes. One such account published in 1841 documented a number of cases of liaisons involving widows all taking place within the family. Abortions were common but, if the matter became public, taking recourse to drastic solutions like murdering the widow to uphold family honour was frequent. Those who were involved in the maintenance of family honour were usually the fathers and brothers of the late husbands of the widows.!*°

That there was social sanction for the killing of 'fallen' widows was also evident in accounts like that of Wilkinson, a medical practitioner located in central India. Wilkinson was horrified at such drastic examples of the continued control by the heads of

86 REWRITING HISTORY

households on female kin in relation to sexual behaviour.!47

Despite the questionable motives of tracts like the one cited above, which was typical of imperialist discourse, the fate of widows within the affinal households was subject to the total control of male kin.

That many widows were seduced by male kin and became dispensable victims of the power hierarchy within the home is evident even though the writing itself tends to attribute these lapses to the laxity of morals of a whole people rather than to power relations within the home.!48

; It is also important to recognise that although the sexuality of the widow remained the focal point of much of male discourse, the aberrations that the repression of widows led to also drew the sympathy of men, especially the natal kinsmen of the widows. In Bengal some fathers had even appealed to the shastris to re-expiore the Shastric position on widow marriage. For example, as far back as the middle of the eighteenth century Raja Rajballav of Vikrampur

(Dacca), unable to accept the permanent widowhood of his teenaged daughter, enlisted the support of scholars on the question of widow marriage.!4? Similarly, moved by the miseries of widowhood experienced by his young daughter, Shyamacharan Das of Calcutta sought permission from the pandits to arrange a second marriage for her.!°° Vidyasagar himself was moved by a mixture of sympathy for the young widow and repugnance for the double standards which permitted even old men to continue remarrying right till the end of their lives. Since all girls were married before puberty such old men invariably married young girls. Thus at the time of their own death the widow left behind was often a child.!>!

In Maharashtra it was often fathers and brothers of the widows who took an interest in the widow marriage movement and organised second marriages for 'virgin' widows in their families.

While in part the motivation for such marriages may have been pragmatic, as widows often lived in their natal households in Maharashtra, it was also because it was difficult to watch daughters and sisters suddenly being transformed into non-persons, regarded as inauspicious, and excluded from normal communal activities, often while still in their childhood.!>? A moving description, written by a widow herself, of how the family priest banished a child widow in the midst of festivities in the household, whilst the helpless father stood by unable to intervene, indicates the guilt and anguish suffered by fathers.!*9 Helpless and ineffective in such

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

situations, it was the 'tyranny of cruel custom' which held men in their grip that was regarded as responsible for the fate suffered by their loved daughters and sisters.

What is notable about men writing about widowhood in the nineteenth century is the paucity of analysis on the structural arrangements in which high-caste Hindu widows were located, or the lack of control widows had over their own lives because of their economic dependence upon male kin. Even the most liberal and sympathetic male reaction to widowhood, and the solution to it, revolved around enforced celibacy and the denial of motherhood to the child widow. Thus the movement for their marriage came to be supported on grounds of the 'unnaturalness' of enforced celibacy upon child widows. In the main it was the repressed sexuality of the widow, the compulsions of a moral society, or the needs of the child widow for a home and children which were the issues that dominated the discussions of men who argued the case for reform.

The humanist impulse was an important aspect of those advocating a change in the status of the widow and was born out of a sense of male guilt at the double standards prevalent in society.

The reformers' rationale for advocating widow remarriage captures many contradictory elements as will be evident in the course of this work. As a group they were to display considerable ambivalence towards both issues of gender and of caste. They had moderate notions of change with a desire to alleviate some of the worst expressions of the inequalities in both institutions rather than any drastic altering of existing practices. However, what was noticeably consistent was a genuine concern for the plight of the child widow forced into a state of social death. These emotions are best captured by Gopal Hari Deshmukh, a champion of the widow reform movement. In a piece published in the Shatapatre he wrote:

I think the misery of women is so great that when I remember it my hair stands on end. These Brahmins instead of killing their daughters put them into greater misery... And still there are some who speak against widow remarriage... Doesn't the heart stir when the throats of girls of twelve, fifteen, twenty, and thirty years are being cut

... You yourselves unprotestingly become the butchers of your own daughters. There is no comparison on earth to a nation like yours ae

Further, an improvement in the status of the widow was also intimately tied to a new self-image of the educated upper castes.

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Certain minimal notions of an individual's (including women's) rights and of a new identity for the community to which the reformers belonged as befitting its position of social leadership in a new environment were other elements in the 'liberal' position.

Nevertheless the reformist discourse was often limited to rhetorical concern as many of the reformers were unable to act effectively on behalf of the widows even in their own families.

The concern expressed by the reformers was countered by the mobilisation of the traditionalists against them. Resistancé to the arguments of the reformers though strong was however articulated more in action during the 1870s with few of their published accounts surviving. In the 1880s however oblique arguments were often expressed about widowhood when Malabari sought opinion!» on the problems of infant wives. A frequent statement represented a convenient male response which was that there was no enforced widowhood in India,!*° rather that it was widows themselves who did not want to be remarried. According to this view, 'the majority of widows will not listen but actually shun the company, nay detest those sympathising philanthropists who volunteer advice to remarry, for the sin of remarriage is deeply engraven at present on their minds' .!97

Men resisting widow remarriage also pointed out that as the practice was associated with lower-caste cultural norms, even castes which had taken to such practices under trying circumstances felt that they were degraded by it. Its degrading characteristic was such that the common prostitute would regard herself as one step above a widow who remarried.!°8 Others pointed to the wide social consensus against remarriage and emphasised that mothers and fathers of widows would 'rather commit suicide' than accept the remarriage of their daughters.!°? Even tonsure was represented as a voluntary act which widows 'adopted' of their own free will. This was a reflection of the widow's desire for a religious life.!°? One reaction was that widows were like 'Italian nuns'.!°! In any case human nature was marvellously plastic and a state of life which many women deliberately adopt and which extrinsic circumstances imposed on others in all civilised lands could not be without compensating consolations. !° Widowhood was also naturalised; it was a misfortune which could strike anyone.

It had nothing to do with particular institutions among particular communities which applied only to

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

women. Mandlik, a prominent specialist in Hindu law, wrote: 'To become a widow is a misfortune. There is no balm to a soul so wounded except the one obtained by entering into a higher kind of life. . .'1°? He also propounded ascetic widowhood as a naturalised state for women: "The Savitri upakhyana shows that the second marriage of a woman is opposed to Hindu religious convictions.

The Savitri days are the holiest festivals for females in India'.!©4 To exonerate themselves of their own complicity in the oppression of widows men sometimes argued that they actually enjoyed high status and were not oppressed at all. In fact they were the final authority on all matters of the household. As they had more 'leisure' than married women it was the widows who directed the house.' The most effective erasure of upper-caste male complicity in enforced widowhood may be seen in the argument that it was a 'wise economy of Providence' that among every civilised people, some men [where were they?] and women should remain single (either through widowhood or by choosing not to marry, as in the West) so as to remain disentangled from the anxieties and trials of matrimony for ministering to those in sorrow and suffering. Widows were necessary to act as ministering angels.

Because of the virulence of the resistance to widow remarriage, which in a way reflected the inability of the upper castes to make changes in the family codes and caste norms on one issue without threatening the entire structure, the reformers too were careful in isolating the child 'virgin' widow as the object of their concern. In no way did they critique the entire structure of Brahmanical patriarchy, the caste practices or the property structures in which they were embedded. Perhaps this will explain why the reformers spearheading widow remarriage throughout the controversy presented their position as no radical innovation but merely an .

attempt at restoring 'the days of our past history' .!°7 In order to propagate their limited agenda of remarriage in the case of the child widow and using the argument that it was consonant with past practices, the reformers set up the Vidhava Vivahottejak

Mandal (Hindu Widow Marriage Association) in 1866. They directed their attention at the high castes and announced their

'intention to consider 'the best means of re-introducing the practice

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of remarriage of females of the high caste community who have, or may, become widows and to advocate the cause on the authority of the Hindu Dharma Shastra' (emphasis added).!°8 Appropriately the composition of the mandal, though dominated by Brahmanas, did have prominent members drawn from other castes such as Moroba

Kanoba, a Pathare Prabhu, and the Maratha chief Ramachandra Rao Appasaheb. Thus while the battle for widow remarriage had to be fought within each caste, the association and the issue cut across the upper castes and by the end of the decade it became an issue also for the Kapol Banias and Pathare Prabhus. It was an issue which brought together the educated class, pecans in Bombay where the first such wedding was performed.!¢

Two lines of communication were used in mobilising opinion in support of widow remarriage. The first was the reformist newspaper Indu Prakash, which carried contributions to the debate, and the second was the newly-available mofussil network of graduates who had by now spread out effectively over a wide area.

Vishnu Shastri, a key actor in the controversy, carried the debate in person through a tour of the principal towns lecturing on the widow remarriage question. It was the first attempt to test whether

'public opinion could influence the application of Dharmashastra' by appealing to the literate public of Maharashtra, comprising largely Brahmanas.!7° As the debate intensified the orthodox defenders of the status quo prepared themselves to move from opposition to the government for passing the act to combating their own caste-fellows by setting up their own organisation for the protection of the Hindu Dharma called the Hindu Dharma Vyavasthapak Mandal oe the events of the sati controversy in Bengal in the 1820s.''! Matters were precipitated when the issues moved from questions of interpretation to concrete action in the form of the remarriage of a widow performed with reformist support in Bombay in June 1869.!72

The wedding was performed in the relatively more cosmopolitan Bombay in the house of the Pathare Prabhu, Moroba Kanoba. It was sponsored by seven reformist Brahmanas and attended by a large body of the elite from various towns of western India. The bride, Venubai, was a widow aged 17 who had been widowed within eight months of her earlier marriage at the age of nine. Both her parents were dead. Her father died at the age of eighty-five,

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

only three months before her remarriage to a bachelor, Pandurang Vinayak Karmakar, aged 25, educated in Marathi and English, and an assistant school master in an Anglo-vernacular school in the Khandesh collectorate. The marriage was performed by the eldest of her three brothers. A few days later the young couple gave a reception to a group of persons comprising Pathare Prabhus,

Shenvis, Sonars and Brahmanas. According to the report of the event the wedding was performed by Vishnu Shastri Pandit following the usual ritual practices of the Brahmanas.!73

The wedding had been public in every sense, beginning with an advertisement for a groom in the pages of the Indu Prakash to threats of burning the house in which it was performed and of assaults upon the bride, arrangements to prevent a riot and finally to the use of excommunication by the infuriated opposition

(proclaimed at a public meeting held at Thakurdwar in Bombay).!74

The problem posed before the Brahmanas was whether all those who had attended the wedding should be excommunicated (these would include a motley group, other castes, apart from Brahmanas and some Englishmen). Finally, it was decided to excommunicate the immediate offenders, the couple, Venubai's brother and the seven signatories who had organised the wedding.!"°

The conflict had now clearly gone beyond the limits of working out a consensus within the community. The reformers and their opponents settled for having a full fledged shastrartha to debate the Shastric points and the reformers brought in the Shankaracharya to preside over the public debate.!7° It was reported that the Shankaracharya had been secretly agreeable to negotiating a compromise permitting remarriage of child widows if the reformers dropped their campaign to include widows whose marriages had

_ been consummated. The reformers, believing that they could carry their point of view, reportedly rejected the compromise.'""

The debate itself was marked by controversy about the application of pressure leading to floor-crossing and other allegations of unethical actions by the orthodox to achieve a majority in their favour. They had earlier refused to permit the liberal historian and Sanskritist R.G. Bhandarkar, who supported the campaign for widow remarriage, to take an official part in the debate because he was a Saraswat Brahmana.'78 Among the arguments used was one advanced by the reformers that widow remarriage was permissible in the Kaliyuga and the orthodox

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arguing that it was not yet the Kaliyuga! The conclusion of the debate was so bitter that it led to prosecutions over defamation.

The issue of widow remarriage had been so surcharged for the orthodox that they considered it permissible to lie in the 'service' of religion.!"?

Their violent defence of enforced widowhood was, for the orthodox, the culmination of a long period of disquiet beginning with the British refusal to support Brahmana disciplinary power over other castes, as well as their notions about the loss of respect they had suffered in society, the loss of their income and an anxiety about conversion and the cultural uniqueness of their caste. Giving up the cherished ideal of sacred marriage for women, the strict control over female sexuality generally and the enforcement of the non-sexuality of the widow was tantamount to the loss of the identity of the Brahmanas. What had distinguished the Brahmanas from other castes traditionally was their exclusive right to certain ritual practices, their monopoly over learning (now theoretically and also to some extent in real terms eroded) and the strictest of sexual codes for their women, and of course, enforced widowhood.

The key to the strength of the resistance to widow remarriage (and thereafter to other gender issues in the nineteenth century) lay in the fact that it represented a feature of lower-caste morality and sexual practices; the adoption of a lower-caste model was now being advocated for the highest caste. While the lower castes' adoption of the practices of upper castes was well-established as a measure of upward social mobility, the reverse was unheard of and unthinkable within the framework of Brahmanic ideology. Until recently, the Brahmanas had fiercely resisted attempts at Sanskritisation (as we have outlined, earlier) by the lower castes; now the very same

'pre-eminent' caste was to adopt a practice which would bring them down to the level of those they despised.

Further, caste contestations had intensified throughout the century; consequently far from declining in incidence, enforced widowhood was growing as it was adopted by every upwardly mobile caste in western

India.'8° Such a situation of social flux exacerbated tensions with which the widow remarriage issue got entangled and this accounts for the passions it aroused; gender and caste were inextricably linked in the orthodox Brahmana position on widow remarriage.

Perhaps it was the failure of the reformers to address the interpenetrative nature of gender, caste, property structures and

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

However, while little was achieved in concrete terms on widow remarfriages, necessitating a renewal of attention in the 1880s, the bitterness and polarisation resulting from it led to contradictory consequences. First, the limits of the 'liberal' position were very evident and so was the continuation of a very real power, the power to excommunicate, in the hands of the Brahmanas. The two were of course related because the sobering of the reformers was achieved through the power of excommunication.!® All the significant

Participants were ostracised and sometimes had to recant their positions through the application of larger social pressures even if they had earlier managed to stand their ground, as for example in the case of Gopal Hari Deshmukh. When his married daughter's mother-in-law threatened to dissolve the marriage, Deshmukh succumbed and performed prayaschitta. He also made a public statement in the columns of the /ndu Prakash on why he had done so.!84 Despite his prayaschitta he endured such severe ostracism that he declined to accept the Bombay government's invitation to testify before the Finance Commission in London the following year for fear of orthodox reprisals against his crossing the ocean.'®' Ranade stood his ground initially but caved in in 1873, to the horror of all reformists, when he succumbed to family pressures against marrying a widow after his first wife died.!8° In Bombay too the reformers found that they could fund a scholar to travel abroad but not eat with the scholar on his return, or they could encourage widow remarriage but not have social relations with the couple thereafter.

The Brahmana and upper-caste reformers were subject to such ambiguities since they could not stand outside the coercive power of the community and were not willing to break with their kin and caste-fellows.!8" Their location within their caste, their larger social position and their attempt to reinterpret tradition and remain within it provided the parameters within which they struggled to manoeuvre, somewhat ineffectively.

It is not surprising that Vidyasagar himself died a disillusioned man. Before his death he shared his disappointment with a visitor from Maharashtra to

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whom he said that he was now finally convinced that the Hindus, as Hindus, would never accept social reform.!88 The recourse to coercive social action by the orthodox Brahmanas against the reformers was considered 'natural' but the conclusion of the widow remarriage debate which ended in unintended court cases was seen by many Brahmanas, not merely the orthodox among them, as allowing the conflict to escalate beyond the purview of the Brahmana authorities. In this the reformers were regarded as overstepping themselves and in the polarisation that followed the reformers were a beleaguered minority.!®" Gender was to remain the most divisive issue for the different caste/class groups till political strategies and nationalism replaced it as the basis of internal splits among the upper castes during the closing years of the nineteenth century.

For the rest of the decade the reformers dropped gender as an issue and thereafter Brahmana reformers never, of their own accord, centre-staged it as a cause to support although they took sides when others initiated a debate. Rather, the reverse happened as we shall see. Since the remarriage conflict had split the Hindu elite, they tried to breach the split and moved to 'political' and economic issues outside religion and culture on which there was less disagreement in the 1870s among the Brahmanas.

The establishment of the Vedashastrottejaka Sabha in 1873 drew all shastris, old and new, to promote Sanskrit studies with Bhandarkar and Ranade playing a leading part in it. The Prarthana Sabha with which they were associated also consciously steered a moderate path, unlike the more radical Paramahansa Mandal's stand earlier on, and tried to remain close to the Brahmana mainstream. And finally, when the reformist Brahmanas moved to set up the Poona

Sarvajanik Sabha, an alliance of professional and landholding elites dominated by Brahmanas, the founding statement provided that the body would deal only with 'political' issues (where one could unite as a class) and avoid divisive social and religious issues which would fragment them.!"° VII The founding of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha was the first formal attempt by the Brahmanas and other upper-caste elites to solidify their paternalistic leadership of society. Comprising the pre-colonial

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

elites who had been the social leaders but who were now threatened with both internal and external strains, the Sabha was a means of reconstructing, along new lines, their social leadership in Western

India. In the sixties and seventies the increasing opportunities for the elites to partake of civic and political action in Poona convinced the Brahmana reformers that to be effective, and have an impact on British opinion, such action must be based on a coalition of all social and economic elites. They thus made unity of the upper castes, who still remained the elite, their highest priority. !?!

The aim of the Sarvajanik Sabha was to press for wider Indian participation in the administration, to place their own interests before the rulers and to interpret the conditions and needs of their society. !9?

The early activities of the Sabha had begun characteristically with an issue regarding the management of the Parvati temple, possibly as a means of taking up a cause with a wide appeal among the Brahmanas, but as the decade progressed, with the considerable economic distress in the Deccan, the Sabha reached out to the countryside and mobilised opinion against the revised land revenue assessments.!?? The active work of the Sabha on the revenue question was decisive evidence of its claim to social leadership; the extremely widespread rural opposition was consistent also with Brahmana interest given the intimate connection with the land for a large number of them.

The outbreak of the Deccan Riots in 1875 during which attacks were made on the Marwari and Gujarati money-lenders (and where the Brahmana money-lenders often supported the attacks on the 'outsiders') led the Bombay government to suspect the hand of the Sabha activists in the disturbances. The work of the Sabha in collecting evidence during the famine and the outbreak of dacoities led by the Chitpavan Vasudeo Balwant Phadke, who wished to restore Maratha rule, in early 1879, led to increased suspicion about the Brahmana-dominated Sabha connections.

The Brahmana position on the riots had actually been ambivalent. Some of their money-lenders were also frightened by the militancy of the peasant action. Phadke had found little support among the Brahmanas for his activities and was forced to fall back on the Ramoshis and other low castes.!24 Nevertheless the British transferred Ranade from Poona to Nasik,!9° a move which marked the beginning of the Bombay governments Brahmanophobia which increased phenomenally during che rest of the decade. Ironically, Ranade,

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regarded as a British collaborator by the Brahmana orthodoxy, became suspect by the British themselves — at least during the heyday of the Sabha's activities.

As the Sabha's consolidated its claims to social leadership of society as a whole during the 70s, the non-Brahmana movement, now officially launched with the setting up of the Satyashodhak

Samaj, contested the paternalism of the Sabha. Initially, although Phule had been contemptuous of the organisation, dismissing it as a 'Bhatt sabha',!° he had remained associated with it selectively.

Since the Sabha was preponderantly Brahmana in composition with Chitpavans outnumbering others, the non-Brahmana leaders came to regard it as an ideological rival and were sharply aware of its power. They were conscious that the Sabha embodied a particular view of Indian society and regarded itself as the proper social leadership which would mould future Indian political institutions.

The non-Brahmana leaders were equally conscious that the viewpoint of the Sabha was different from their own.!?" If the Sabha was a means of uniting the elites after its internal conflicts over gender, its success in doing so generated a new arena of contestation between the elites and others.

The Sarvajanik Sabha was one of the regional bodies that fed into the provincial and then the Indian National Congress.!?8 Its narrow social composition continued to be reproduced even in the Congress and the non-Brahmana alternative to it in the form of the Satyashodhak Samaj indicates that the Sabha's claim to speak for the whole of society was contested by those who saw themselves as excluded from that class but subsumed under it. The critique of the limited social base of an organisation subsuming others and speaking for them was to be replayed with the Congress both in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

| During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Brahmana power was seriously under pressure for a second time. The attitude of the colonial state towards the community fluctuated according to the understanding or predilections of the current set of administrators. The growing Brahmanophobia was sometimes expressed as applying to the entire body of Brahmanas but more often it was focused specifically on the Chitpavans.!?? Colonial strategy was to veer around playing one sub-caste off against

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

another; for example the Saraswats against the Chitpavans.

Individual administrators considered the reformers more reliable than the more conservative sections among the Brahmanas and equally it was suggested that other non-Brahmana castes such as Prabhus or Marathas, or even the Muslims, could be encouraged in order to break the Brahmana monopoly." The Brahmanas were aware of the hostility towards them and were bewildered by it.

Their sense of anxiety and alienation led the bulk of them to search for a more cohesive sense of identity as well as to fiercely prevent an erosion of their power which was being seriously challenged by the castes below them.

Certain economic and demographic pressures working upon the Brahmanas increased the sense of crisis and beleaguerment. The number of educated, predominantly Brahmanas in the Poona

Deccan, had swelled in the post-1870s. Since the British policy had always been to recruit Indians only at the lower administrative level, the growing numbers of the educated found if difficult to get employment and were also excluded from the higher rungs. The Director of Public Instruction noted in the 1870s that the public service was clogged with a surfeit of graduates. By the 1880s the education bulge was being fully felt. Further, the crunch was aggravated in the case of the Deccan elite since the occupational biases of the Brahmanas fitted them for little else than public service.*°! The excess of graduates in a situation of British policy vacillations towards them, and the criticisms of the non-Brahmana leaders about Brahmana monopoly over education and the public services, led them to feel that the days of their privileged position might be numbered.

Changes in the system of land tenure coincidentally also occurred in roughly the same period. The Deccan Riots of 1875 were followed by remedial land legislation and considerable experimentation was under way in the Konkan around khoti whereby the government attempted to regularise the system of land tenure and the relationship of the Khot to his underholders. Many of the khoti tenures dated from Peshwa times when the rulers had appointed officials to collect revenue. The extent of khoti rights was the subject of disputes through the nineteenth century with the government viewing the Khot as a revenue farmer and denying him full proprietary rights. Many of the Khots, including Tilak's family, were involved in expensive and long-drawn-out legal disputes

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around the tenures. Significantly, one of Tilak's first public acts was to petition the Bombay government against the 1879 bill (which nevertheless became an act in 1880) to amend the khoti settlement." It is likely to have adversely affected the Chitpavans

(who were concentrated in the Konkan) in particular. Further, as pressure on the land increased through policy changes and demographic expansion, the migration into Poona for education and recruitment into public service also became greater."°° The sense of dislocation would be deepened, with the economic crisis and educational crisis feeding on each other. Thus, by the end of the nineteenth century social and economic forces had produced a kind of cumulative effect which pressed heavily on the elite.

Non-Brahmana criticism of Brahmana monopoly over education and the public services had, as we have seen, been a central theme in Phule's writing, especially in the post-1870s. At the turn of the century the Maratha rulers of states, especially Kolhapur, were actively encouraging a policy of increasing the recruitment of non-Brahmanas into the public services, which directly affected

Brahmanas who had dominated the services in them.7°4 The expansion itself was declared in a public statement to reserve 50 per cent of the positions for backward communities following Brahmana resistance to conceding the Kolhapur Maharaja the right to the Vedokta ceremonies. Combined with this was the Bombay government's growing awareness of the need to 'secure a due admixture of the various races and castes', to ensure 'fairplay by all classes' in the administration and, as a first move, to implement ways of increasing non-Brahmana participation in education. Since the Brahmanas predominantly availed themselves of free studentships in high schools, in 1885 reserving half the free scholarships for Muslims and 'backward'

Hindu castes was proposed to rectify the situation.2° Despite the pressures on the Brahmanas, their position during the 1890s and even into the first decade of the twentieth century continued, objectively, to be one of strength rather than weakness: they were both consolidating their position in the services and institutions of the presidency and at the same time effectively warding off those who were challenging and wanting to curtail

Brahmana hegemony. It has been suggested that the very strength of the Brahmana position, which they were consequently eager to defend, made them sensitive to any change and willing to contest

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender 99 any effort to diminish their authority.2°° But given the challenges and contestations, subjectively the Brahmanas were experiencing a prolonged period of stress, all of which fed into a crisis of identity that was articulated in a series of attempts at resolving it. Under these circumstances, in the 80s and 90s of the nineteenth century the Brahmana elites were simultaneously engaged in three tussles: among themselves in differing caste/class segments in an attempt to resolve ideological differences around gender, community, nation and politics; then, as a composite elite against the non-Brahmana contestation of their claim to elite status; and finally, flowing from the two arenas, a tussle to control the provincial wing of the Indian

National Congress and thereby shape the future as well as maintain a grip on it.

Following roughly after the widow remarriage controversy, sections of the educated Brahmana elite gave expression, with steadily growing intensity, to the cultural crisis by rooting themselves in tradition as it existed rather than reinterpreting tradition as the 'reformers' had done during the widow remarriage controversy. Typical of this trend was V.N. Mandlik, an eminent jurist whose career resembled Ranade's, but who never made it to the Bombay High Court as Ranade did. These were the two main protagonists on the reform question during the 1880s holding opposing views on the relationship between legislation and social change, revealing how politicised the question of social reform had become. In 1869 Mandlik had published two articles in his newspaper, Native Opinion, where he took a conservative stance on widow remarriage. He drew the attention of the reformers to what he called the 'moral worth'? of the measure rather than trying to build a case solely on religious sanction. He was among the first to argue against social legislation and for a gradual transformation from within," a position to be used forcefully by Tilak later on.

Elsewhere he argued that it was necessary to understand that the simultaneous existence of 'perfect conservatism in regard to some institution (mainly gender, we should add) and a wide departure from old grooves in others' (such as taking to English education and service under the British) was possible and existed among the Brahmanas.7"?

Mandlik's views were influential not merely because of his command over the law but because he was a member of the Bombay Legislative Council for a number of years during the'

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period 1874 to 1884. He was thus strategically placed to articulate fears of 'alien encroachment' upon tradition. As an authority on the Hindu law of inheritance (the foundation of the Hindu joint family and therefore of women's lives), he led the opposition to bills proposing greater inheritance rights for women. During debates in the Legislative Council he argued that the legislature must be

'supremely cautious, and avoid all interference with the social and religious fabric of the Hindu communities' on some assumed standard of public good to which 'we Hindus do not subscribe'.!°

He also argued that the untouchables were not ready for education.!!

The principal issue of contention through the 1870s and 1880s was the degree to which Brahmanas should transform their basic traditional institutions of caste, gender codes and religion. What is significant is that western education was no guarantee of the acceptance of major changes in the social and cultural practices of the Brahmanas. It is notable that many of the new graduates became fierce proponents of traditional Brahmanical practices while sections of the earlier generation had been vocally advocating a certain set of moderate changes.

The best example of the new western-educated Brahmana proponent of 'tradition' was Vishnu Shastri Chiplunkar, son of the well known 'liberal' shastri Krishna Shastri Chiplunkar, who had advocated the introduction of non-Brahmana students to the Sanskrit College, been associated with Phule in some of his early ventures at schooling for the lower castes, and had been penalised for dining with an Englishman in 1870.7!* Vishnu Shastri levelled fierce criticisms at his father Krishna Shastri in the Nibandhamala, a paper run by him, for advocating reforms including widow remarriage on the ground that his father's generation had been overwhelmed by the new learning, and had _ thoughtlessly abandoned traditional values which were far 'superior' to the modern. Among those who came in for criticism was Lokahitwadi

V.H. Deshmukh, Phule, the Prarthana Samaj, and the missionaries for belittling Hindu traditions.?!3 The anti-reformist position of Mandlik and Vishnu Shastri Chiplunkar was carried forward with dramatic effect by Tilak, who used every possible occasion to build opinion against the 'Sudharaks' and establish a decisive control over Brahmana opinion, always represented as Hindu opinion.

Until the mid-80s when the polarisation between the two caste segments of the Brahmanas resurfaced over a gender issue, the issue

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

of child marriage and enforced widowhood (again a sign for 'cultural' and 'religious' values), and the identity of the nation, the Brahmanas' debates about tradition did not exclude their ability to function as an interest group when their material position was seemingly or actually threatened. Indeed, even after the violent nature of the polarisation in the late 80s and early 90s the Brahmana attitude to the non-Brahmana movement's push for increased representation in the public services and in educational institutions was unified (although the manner in which it was expressed could be aggressive or subtle according to the specific caste segment in which one was located). The Poona Sarvajanik

Sabha argued that the Bombay government's reserving of studentships for non-Brahmanas was anti-Brahmana and tantamount to 'singling out the Brahmanas and setting them up against other classes'. Further, it was a departure from the policy of strict religious neutrality.*!4 Later, when the Maharaja of Kolhapur reserved positions in the state's public services, the newspaper

_ Mahratta, speaking for all Brahmanas, complained that it was aimed at weakening the Brahmana community and was designed to facilitate the 'hot-house growth of one caste'.?!°

The reformers and traditionalists demonstrated unity of purpose effectively again in 1901 when the Bombay government was contemplating legislation on the issue of land alienation on the lines of the Punjab Act. The proposal sparked off a 'fierce' and hysterical clamour unprecedented in the presidency with protest meetings taking place in every major town. Both rural and urban elites were involved in the protest and in sending off a barrage of petitions against the bill. The protesters included Ranade (before he died),

Gokhale, to whom his mantle had passed, and of course the Tilakites, many of whom had links with the money-lending class amongst Brahmanas. Earlier, in 1891, Tilak had opposed the Agriculturalists Relief Act which was designed to prevent the raiyat from falling into the clutches of the money-lender.?!° Reformers and traditionalists among Hindus and other businessmen in Bombay all came together in 1901 to oppose the proposed move partly through support to laissez-faire ideas, partly through their own land interests and partly through direct links with the moneylending class.

They were vocally supported by the middle-class press.

Internal unity among the Brahmana elite on issues of direct

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material interest however was insufficient to hold them together on issues of culture, religious belief and practice, including gender, and especially politics, but even here we must note many of the shared assumptions of most Brahmanas. The shared assumptions were an outcome of a common upper-caste legacy, a largely Brahmanic

Hindu worldview where the differences lay in the emphasis on particular aspects of the legacy rather than in the structure as a whole as will be outlined below. This was particularly true during the post-widow remarriage debate period when Bhandarkar and Ranade, both active members of the Prarthana Samaj, were typical of the 'Sudharaks' and Mandlik, Chiplunkar and Tilak of the 'conservatives'. The Sudharaks were by now chastened, much more desirous of remaining within the Brahmana mainstream (especially

Ranade) and they strove hard to express their positions on issues such as caste, religion and even gender, in moderate terms. Their differences, ideologically, were with the non-Brahmanas, especially with Phule, over his focus on the exploitative nature of Brahmanism, over what Shivaji symbolised and what value to attribute to the term 'Aryan' — generally on Phule's understanding of the past as an explanation of the present. All Brahmanas shared a view of the Aryans as dynamic, vigorous and noble. Brahmanism was for Ranade the Aryan faith which had served to unite north and south in ancient India.*!" The Aryan theory was a convenient device among many Brahmana intellectuals to mark off the 'foreign' hordes with a Semitic or Turkic-Mongoloid background who poured into India and to whom was attributed the introduction of many ills in Indian society, most important of which was the degeneration of women's status. Further, for Ranade, the Aryans were the chosen race and he lamented that their chivalrous civilisation was suppressed in certain ways by the 'lower races and tribes'.*!® Significantly, he also advocated the 'Aryanisation' of those castes traditionally excluded from the scriptures. And finally, in a characteristic slide, he linked these views to the present and to his politics by suggesting that Providence had sent the English to India to provide a living example of 'pure Aryan customs' with regard to the treatment of women. With English support the Hindus could free themselves from the patriarchal Muslim tradition and could restore their old healthy practices."!

On the other side of the supposed divide between reformers and conservatives Tilak's emphasis was, again characteristically, on the

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

powers of conquest of the Aryans which he lauded. This he linked to the high degree of civilisation they had attained in their original home close to the North Pole, giving them the capacity to 'exterminate or assimilate all the non-Aryan races with whom they came in contact in their migration in search of new lands'.?2

Differences were clearly only in regarding conquest as a civilising 'force' or in unambiguously approving it as an indication of physical prowess.

Similarly, both Ranade and later Tilak regarded Shivaji as a 'national' hero. Ranade wrote powerfully about the exploits of Shivaji who was the focal point of his influential book published in 1891, The Rise of the Maratha Power. Building around a Kshatriya tradition and within the framework of a composite

Maharashtrian identity Ranade makes Shivaji emerge as a hero burning with 'national spirit'. However, Ranade attributed the 'national spirit' itself to the composite regional tradition of the Maratha Bhakti poets. The legacy of Shivaji in his view was not exclusively a Brahmana or even a Hindu tradition. It tried to put

Shivaji above caste and religion and link him with tolerance and moderation."*! But in all of this Ranade was also among the first to turn to history to enhance the position of the Poona elite. It was particularly significant in countering Phule's version of Shivaji as a Shudra hero, and in attempting to demonstrate the essential

'compatibility' of the interests of various castes and classes. The Shivaji tradition helped to establish the legitimacy of the Poona

Brahmanas of the Sarvajanik Sabha to lead their society. Tilak only extended all these elements when he introduced the Shivaji festival as a means of mobilising the elites and the masses against the British. He also took great care to identify his endeavour with the catholic tradition of Ranade's version of Shivaji??? and thereby received the support of the reformists' paper Sudharak. But it is in interpreting the figure of Ramdas as the spiritual mentor of Shivaji that the difference between Ranade and Tilak emerges. This difference marked their distinctive approaches to history. While

Ranade emphasised the synthesis and 'protestant' dimensions of Hinduism embodied in Bhakti, the conservative historians privileged the Brahmanic element, in particular in Hinduism. The real hero of medieval Maharashtra (before political use was made of Shivaji) for the Tilakites was Ramdas, for whom Maharashtra dharma was a call to an ancient theocratic state. Ramdas was cast

REWRITING HISTORY

as a militant saint, a brabmachari who was a Hanuman-worshipper — a figure of masculine strength. Ramdas, in this version, set up akharas for physical training along with mathas all over Maharashtra to prepare the populace for the impending struggle with the Muslims. This view of Ramdas was a construction of a section of Brahmana historiography, especially of the Rajwade School which acted as a counter to Phule's interpretation of Shivaji as the Shudra hero of medieval Maharashtra."*? It Brahmanised Shivaji and it worked to almost make Tilak a direct inheritor of the Ramdas legacy.

The crux of the difference between the Sudharaks and the Tilakites thus was not in the recourse to tradition, which both shared, but with a distinctive highlighting of certain phases and elements in it. While the Sudharaks, especially Ranade and Bhandarkar, concentrated a good deal on the early 'progressive' and glorious civilisation of ancient India, those who were anti-reform tended to concentrate much more upon the more recent glories of Maharashtra, especially on the Chitpavan combination of Kshatriya-Brahmana values in the same person as articulated in the Peshwai. Brahmana role reversal under the Peshwai was applauded by Vishnu Shastri Chiplunkar, and Bajirao I was depicted as a romantic, brave, and religious ruler.?** Working together, both the Sudharak view of history and that of the opponents of the reformers were to dominate the Brahmana mind and marginalise Phule's view which had cast the Brahmanas as usurpers and exploiters.

The difficulties of manoeuvring a 'rational' position on caste while retaining their social base among the upper-caste, primarily

Brahmana, elite in the Poona Deccan were evident in the reformers' handling of this sensitive subject. At the level of ideas it was possible to argue against it, which the reformers did, while at the same time rationalising its historic role. Ranade also stressed its flexibility, arguing that in the past the system was dynamic and open, enabling the lower orders to rise to higher status. History in India thus proved that it had changed and could change, but by slow absorption — assimilation rather than 'convulsion'.2#> But in practice, caste norms including the coercive power of the Brahmanas, determined the limits of how far one could go on personal conviction. None of the reformers, especially not Ranade, managed to throw off Brahmanism in their personal lives.

Increasingly, as the crisis built up, even their paternalistic support

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

for non-Brahmana activities had to be curbed for fear of social disapproval from their elite constituency.

The anti-reformers on the other hand had no such dilemmas to resolve. They could reveal their Brahmanism quite openly; Mandlik had argued that the untouchables were not yet ready for education.

Tilak could say at various times that the caste system was like the medieval European guild, untouchability was degrading but it was a fact of Indian life, that artisans should stick to their craft and leave politics to Brahmanas, that the so-called 'Kshatriyas' should not demand the Vedokta,"*° and that the real problem to confront was that all Indians were slaves and Shudras in relation to the British.**7 It seems the anti-reformers could take a more open stand on caste after the reformist Brahmanas drew away from Phule. Tilak refused to sign a pledge against untouchability??® and the Kesari made a special target of Phule for being irreligious (when Phule was mobilising non-Brahmanas against using Brahmana priests at their ceremonies). The Tilakites were also particularly gleeful at the conservative reaction to Phule among the non-Brahmanas who were critical of his radicalism.???

Despite the shared ground on many positions on tradition and history, ultimately because of the larger cultural crisis the more moderate and syncretic position of the reformers could not satisfy the majority of the Brahmanas politically; they responded more enthusiastically to the orthodox views of Tilak because it was more openly based on a reiteration not just of tradition, but of the traditional power of the Brahmanas. This was evident in the critical sphere of gender issues and the way these issues were used to outmanoeuvre the reformers as a political force, and thereafter to establish leadership over the elites as well as the community over which they presided.

Internal conflict within the Brahmana community in western India resurfaced once more in the 1880s around a series of social and political issues and culminated in the bitter polarisation over the Age of Consent Bill. Through these internal conflicts, some expressed as personal rivalries and others as social differences, Tilak consolidated first the position of the anti-reformers and then established his group as the 'popular' social leaders of western India."*° It is significant that through these years, personal rivalries for leadership within the Brahmana community came to be recast as political and ideological differences. The transition was achieved through a mobilisation of conservative

106 REWRITING HISTORY

popular opinion on the emotive gender issues of child marriage, enforced widowhood and the proper age for the consummation of a marriage. Tilak displayed considerable skill in effecting the shift of focus from factional struggles for control over institutions, and therefore over leadership, to the polarisation around gender. It is in the larger context of caste contestation, class formation and the emergence of nationalism, processes that we have tried to outline in this chapter, that we can explore the structural changes experienced by women of the new 'middle classes' in nmeteenth century Maharashtra.

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. Although there are a number of monographs and analyses which explore agrarian changes, social changes and the emergence of nationalism in the nineteenth century in western India, there is no existing work that incorporates gender into its analysis especially in its relationship to caste contestation and class formation during the same period.

2. Kenneth Ballhatchet, Social Policy and Social Change in Western India, 1817-1830, London, Oxford University Press, 1957, p. 30.

3. For example, to compensate for some of the excesses perpetrated during the takeover by European and Indian soldiers, it was necessary to have the plunderers, the Europeans in particular, punished in the streets of the town. The Brahmanas who had fled were recalled to perform purificatory ceremonies and placated with gifts of money. As Elphinstone wrote, 'Never scruple to give large sums when temples of note are really polluted. It shows our anxiety to respect the religion of the country' (Ballhatchet, Social Policy, p.

28).

Ballhatchet, Social Policy, p. 31; R. Kumar, Western India, p. 75.

Ballhatchet, Social Policy, pp. 86-87.

Ibid., p. 73.

Ibid., p. 75. In relation to British rule and the inamdars it has been argued that the British conquest was essentially a change in Opportunities, and hence the strategies of the inamdars, rather than a Ig ae a decisive break in their wielding of power. The main themes in the relations between the state, Maratha or British, and its privileged subjects did not substantially change. According to this view there has been an overemphasis on the political fact of conquest and the disjunctions were less in many areas than they have been made out

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

to be. The relations between the inamdars and the state were disrupted not by the British but after Independence in 1952. As the revenue minister said, the rights of the inamdars granted by the British 'were nothing short of a bribe paid for acquiescing in foreign domination and refraining from a mutiny'. The cards were well played and in general the inamdars continued to be loyal servants of the British (Laurence W. Preston, 'The authority of the state in Western India, 1818-1857', in D.W. Atwood, M. Israel and N.K.

Wagle, City, Countryside and Society in Maharashtra, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1988, pp. 77-95, p. 79).

Ballhatchet, Social Policy, pp. 144-46.

Ibid., p. 153.

. Elphinstone wrote in a letter to J.D. Suares dated 3.11.1818, 'The Brahmanas are the greatest sufferers by the change. From their temporal power and influence they possess the means of creating alarm and disturbance to a degree that renders the utmost prudence and vigilance necessary on our part. No engine could be put into the hands of this discontented priesthood so powerful as an opinion that we entertained even the remotest design of converting the people,' Ballhatchet, Social Policy, pp. 83-84.

Preston, "The Authority of the State', p. 85.

R.D.

Choksey, The Last Phase:

Selections From the Deccan Commissioner's Files (Peshwa Daftar), 1815-1818.

With an Introductory Note on the British Diplomacy at the Court of the Peshwa, Bombay, Phoenix Publishers, 1948, pp. 223ff.

Judicial Department, Vol. 48 of 1882, cited in Kumar, Western India, p. 81.

Kumar, Western India, p. 79.

Sripati Roy, Customs and Customary Law in British India, Delhi, Mittal Publications, 1986, [Reprint of 1910 edition]. The new government however assumed criminal jurisdiction and also created a structure of courts above the Panchayats. These were to draw heavily or exclusively upon western principles of law (Kumar,

11.

WS 13.

14. ie?

Western India, p. 80).

Ballhatchet, Social Policy, p. 210.

16.

Ibid., pp. 223-224.

In 1823, for example, Robertson made strategic use of the annual dakshina ceremony where gifts were given to Brahmanas in order r7e 18. to debate the issue of sati. Five hundred learned pandits participated in the discussion with Robertson himself functioning like a learned pandit as he took part in the deliberations. Robertson's position that the legality of sati rested on the exercise of 'free will' was forcefully argued by Vitthal Upadhyaya (Ballhatchet, Social Policy, pp. 284-5).

REWRITING HISTORY

Ballhatchet, Social Policy, pp. 287-90.

20.

21.

Tbid., p. 302.

My argument on this issue is based on a meticulous marshalling of the facts of this case as described and analysed by Wagle in N.K.

Wagle, 'A Dispute Between the Pancal Devajna Sonars and the Brahmanas of Pune Regarding Social Rank and Ritual Privileges: A Case Study of the British Administration of Jati Laws in Maharashtra, 1822-25' in N.K. Wagle (ed.), Jmages of Maharashtra:

A Regional Profile, London, Curzon Press, 1980, pp. 129-159.

Ibid. p. 132.

Ibid., p. 133.

Ibid., p. 145.

Ibid, p. 130.

Ibid., p. 136. Jagannath had earnest hopes that he and his fellow castemen would be admitted to the Brahmana caste (see A.

Crawford, Our Troubles in Poona and the Deccan, Westminister, Constable and Company, 1897, p. 210).

Such tailoring was occurring both for the ends of the British Administration and caste interests. The Commissioner for the 22.

22:

24.

23.

26.

Deccan took a dim view of Trivengadacharya's championing of the Sonars and the Rathakara Samskara Kalpadruma, the text he cited.

The text itself was only compiled the previous year by Trivengadacharya (Wagle, 'British Administration of Jati Laws,' pp.

1327153) . Wagle, 'British Administration of Jati Laws', p. 140.

Ibid., p. 141.

& leid., PL lare . Arthur Steele, The Hindu Castes, pp. vi-xix; Ballhatchet, Social

Policy, p. 200.

. Wagle, 'British Administration of Jati Laws' p. 131.

. Lbid.

. Ibid, p. 134.

. Rosalind O'Hanlon, Caste, Conflict, and Ideology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 24.

Ibid., pp. 24-26.

Ibid., p. 27. The summary of the details of the Maratha-Brahmana caste dispute is based on pp. 27-41 of O'Hanlon's discussion of the political conflict around the varna status of the ruling family of Satara.

Only 96 'pure' Maratha families could trace their lineages to the traditional Rajput vanshas. These 'genuine' Kshatriya families claimed the right as Kshatriyas to domestic rituals, chiefly at the time of marriage and death, based on sacred texts drawn from the 38.

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

Vedas. The others were entitled only to words drawn from the less sacred Puranas (O'Hanlon, Caste, p. 17).

Ibid., p. 34. oy, 40.

Ibid., p. 38. Pratapsinh wrote in his diary, 'If this goes on dharma itself will not remain. Each man should stick to his own caste but in spite of this these men are trying to spread money around in our caste. But make no mistake, all Kshatriyas will look to protect their caste in this matter' (G.S. Sardesai (ed.), Selections from the Peshwa

Daftar: Papers Referring to Pratapsinh, Raja of Satara, pp. 85-86, cited in O'Hanlon, Caste, p. 38).

Sekhar Bandhopadhyaya, 'Caste, Class and Culture in Colonial India', Indian History Congress Symposia Papers: 1, Delhi, 1992, p. 10.

41.

42.

Ballhatchet, Social Policy, p. 255.

Kumar, Western India, pp. 50-55, 265, 268.

43.

Ibid., pp. 268-69. The experience of the controversy over the dakshina indicates that even a minority of Brahmanas could successfully push through their point of view if it was allied to the government's position.

44, 45.

B.B. Misra, The Indian Middle Classes: Their Growth in Modern Times, London, Oxford University Press, 1961, p. 161.

As Trevelyan argued, "The poor man is not less the object of the committee's solicitude than the rich'; but while the means at their disposal were extremely limited, here were millions of all classes to be educated. It was absolutely necessary to make a selection, and they therefore selected the upper and middle classes as the first object of their attention, because by educating them first they would 'soonest be able to extend the same advantages to the rest of the people' (/bid.,

46. pp. 151-52).

Mountstuart Elphinstone, minute 13.12.1825, cited in Ballhatchet, Social Policy, p. 258.

Ballhatchet, Social Policy, p. 262.

There were broadly four sets of contestations: two between the British and the Brahmanas and between the orthodox Brahmanas and 'new' Brahmanas over the content of education, and two between the colonial government and the missionaries and between the Brahmanas and non-Brahmanas over the inclusion of the lower castes in the educational agenda.

47, 48.

49.

Ballhatchet, Social Policy, p. 258.

O'Hanlon, Caste, pp. 5-6.

Richard Tucker, 'The Early Setting of the non-Brahmin Movement in Maharashtra', The Indian Historical Review, Vol. 7, Nos. 1-2, 1981,

50.

52,

REWRITING HISTORY

pp. 138-39. In the Ahmednagar mission school Mahars constituted the largest number of students.

. Kumar, Western India, p. 283. Also see Dr. Gadgil, Poona: A Socio-Economic Survey, Part II, Poona, Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, 1952, pp. 286-87. Gadgil provides substantial evidence for the domination of Poona Brahmanas in educational institutions right into the 1930s.

. Kumar, Western India, p. 283.

. R.E. Enthoven, Tribes and Castes of Bombay, Vol. III, Delhi, Cosmo, 1975 (reprint) pp. 249-51.

. Christine Dobbin, Urban Leadership in Western India: Politics and Communities in Bombay City, 1840-1885, London, Oxford University Press, 1972, p. 6.

Ibid., p. 265.

. Dobbin, Urban Leadership, p. 6.

. Richard Tucker, 'Early Setting of the Non-Brahmin Movement, p. 155; Arthur Crawford, Our Troubles, p. 153.

. Dobbin, Urban Leadership, pp. 35-38.

Misra, The Middle Classes, p. 338.

. While such an analysis for all castes is needed to obtain a comprehensive picture of the process of class formation and the relationship between caste and class, I focus here on the Brahmanas.

It is easier to focus on them because this is one caste for which documentation exists. However, the focus may also be justified because the Brahmanas, as a caste, dominated the shaping of gender issues and were at the centre of caste contestations.

. Omvedt, Cultural Revolt, p. 94.

64.

65.

Tbid., p. 82.

Ibid., p. 94.

Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol IX, p. 180, cited in Gordon Johnson, "Chitpavan Brahmins and Politics in Western India', in Edmund Leach and S.N. Mukherjee (eds.), Elites in South Asia,

Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990; Frank Conlon, Caste in a Changing World: The Chitrapur Sarawat Brahmans,

1870-1934, Delhi, Thomson Press, 1977 p. 104.

Conlon also reports that Saraswat Brahmanas in the south Konkan had their lands cultivated through tenants. Frank Conlon, Caste in a Changing World, p. 33.

67.

68.

Indian Statutory Commission, Vol VI, p. 229, cited in Johnson, 'Chitpavan Brahmins', p. 104.

Michael Metelits, 'Social and Economic Forces Operating on Local Bodies of Nineteenth Century Deccan Municipalities,' cited in Omvedt, Cultural Revolt, p. 75.

69.

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

Chitpavan Brahmanas dominated in the towns and Deshasthas in the villages (/bid.). aD:

71.

Census of India, 1911, Vol. VII, p. 338, cited in Johnson, 'Chitpavan Brahmins', p. 104.

Ibid., p. 102; also see D.K. Karve 'My Life Story', in D.D.Karve 02.

(ed.), The New Brahmans: Five Maharashtrian Families, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1963, pp. 17ff, for a personal account.

Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. X, p. 113.

Johnson, 'Chitpavan Brahmins', pp. 106-07.

73:

74.

#5:

M.N. Srinivas, Social Change in Modern India, Bombay, Orient Longman, 1972, pp. 96-100.

This section relies heavily on two excellent and comprehensive studies on the non-Brahmana movement and Phule by Gail

Omvedt (Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society) and Rosalind O'Hanlon (Caste, Conflict and Ideology). 1 have merely tried to synthesise certain questions relating the contestations and tensions flowing from them with their bearing on gender.

Omvedt, Cultural Revolt, p. 66.

Phule was introduced to Paine's work by 'an anti-British Brahmana' who wished to unite all castes to win back political control from the British. Phule used the work for a radicalism of a very different kind (O'Hanlon, Caste, pp. 111-14).

For example, Phule's biographer describes an incident in which Phule was invited to a marriage party of a Brahmana friend but was insulted by other Brahmanas present on the occasion. Later when he and his wife Savitribai were engaged in running a school for low-caste girls they faced severe abuse and harassment from the orthodox sections of the Poona Brahmanas (Dhananjay Keer,

Mahatma Jotirao Phooley: Father of the Indian Social Revolution, 76.

Fi.

78. v2.

Bombay, Popular Prakashan, 1974, pp. 17, 25-26).

Padaval's book formed an important part of the repertoire of arguments of the non-Brahmana movement; it was being distributed in 1874 in the villages along with Phule's books on Shivaji and on Brahmana social power (O'Hanlon, Caste, pp. 226, 233).

O'Hanlon, Caste, p. 226.

Phule gives an interesting account of the hollowness of the claim to 'Maratha' status by people who regarded themselves as the old

80.

81.

82. aristocracy. As the conversation proceeds Phule corners one such claimant into admitting his Kunbi connections (Appendix to Phule's

Shetkaryaca Asud cited in Omvedt, Cultural Revolt, p. 110).

O'Hanlon, Caste, p. 265.

83.

84.

Ibid.

REWRITING HISTORY

Ibid., p. 131.

Tbid., p. 80.

85.

86.

Gulamgiri is dedicated to the 'good people of the United States' for their abolition of black slavery and expresses the hope that the people of India may take it as an example and emancipate the lower castes from 'Brahmin thraldom' (Gulamgiri, trans. Ved Kumar

Vadalankar, Bombay, Sadhana Prakashan Samiti, 1974, p. 5).

O'Hanlon, Caste, pp. 122, 200-01.

87.

88.

89.

Vividhadnyan Vistar, July 1869, cited in O'Hanlon, Caste, p. 175.

Phule's explanation of inequalities as stemming from the ancient act of appropriation played a pivotal role in group identity formation

(O'Hanlon, Caste, p. 151). The lower castes could see themselves as searching for a lost wholeness represented by the land in the unconquered state which was contrasted to the hierarchies introduced following the conquest.

For a people denied an understanding of their past this explanation would be extremely enabling.

O'Hanlon, Caste, pp. 141-42.

Joan Leopold, "The Aryan Theory of Race', Indian Economic and valk I; be Social History Review, Vol. 7, No. 2, June 1970, pp. 271-97; Uma

Chakravarti, "Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi: Orientalism, Nationalism, and a Script for the Past,' in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, Delhi,

Kali for Women, 1988, pp. 27-87, pp. 38ff.

O'Hanlon, Caste, pp. 170-71.

93:

94,

96. ia Ibid., p. 175.

Ibid., pp. 169-71.

Ibid., p. 186.

In this context Phule's gesture of sending some of his early writing to the Dakshina Prize Fund assumes significance. The Dakshina

Committee had turned down Phule's version of Shivaji and rewarded Eknath Annaji Joshi's conventional Brahmanical version of Shivaji instead. Earlier they had turned down Phule's first piece of writing, the Traitya Ratna, which remained unpublished during Phule's lifetime (O'Hanlon, Caste, pp.123, 179).

98.

Ibid., p. 218. Another example of a vitriolic attack came from the pen of the famous Vishnu Shastri Chiplunkar who wrote dismissively about Phule whose name he always prefaced with 'Shudra' — Shudra

Religious Teacher, Shudra World Teacher (Keer, Mahatma Jotirao, p. 146).

Omvedt, Cultural Revolt, p. 63.

Phule's disenchantment with the British was evident in the Traitya Ratna where the peasant household's travails at the hands of the oF 100.

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

Brahmana priest become explicable to them through a reconceptualisation of God provided by a missionary. Finally the peasant couple resolve to educate themselves at Phule's night school since the key to a true understanding of their own society lay in education (O'Hanlon, Caste, p. 129).

Jyotiba Phule's evidence to Education Commission, Report of the 101.

Education Commission, Bombay, Vol II, Calcutta, 1884, cited in Kumar, Western India, pp. 307-308.

Tucker, 'Early Setting of the Non-Brahmin Movement', p. 139.

B.B. Misra, The Middle Classes, p. 307.

102.

103.

104.

Census of India, 1931, Vol. VII, Part I, Bombay Report, cited in Omvedt, Cultural Revolt, p. 77.

Phule's biographers detail the difficulties he faced in keeping the institution going, of the outraged reaction of the orthodox and the pressure exerted upon his family which caved under it. Phule and his wife Savitribai had to leave home because of social pressure upon his father. In the face of difficulties in finding teachers Savitribai herself took on the task of teaching the girls and was subjected to much abuse and humiliation by the orthodox who were furious at the temerity of a low-caste woman in empowering herself and then empowering others like her (Keer, Mahatma Jotirao, pp. 23ff).

O'Hanlon, Caste, p. 119.

Dnyanodaya, | April 1853.

Muktabai, 'Mang Maharachya Dukhavisayi' (1855) reprinted in Dnyanodaya centenary volumes (ed.), B.P. Hivale, 1942, cited in Susie Tharu and K. Lalitha (eds.), Women Writing in India, Delhi,

Oxford University Press, Vol. I, pp. 215-16. bid.

105.

106.

107.

108.

109.

110. bi. bi2.

13.

114.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., pp. 213-14.

Keer, Mahatma Jotirao, pp. 86-87; Gail Omvedt, 'Jotiba Phule, the Bahujan Samaj and Women', unpublished typescript.

Marathi film on Jyotiba Phule, shown on Doordarshan in 1990.

O'Hanlon, Caste, p. 262.

Tarabai Shinde, Stri-Purusha Tulana, Poona, 1882, tr. by Rosalind O'Hanlon, A Comparison Between Women and Men: Tarabai Shinde and the Critique of Gender Relations in Colonial India, Madras,

Oxford University Press, 1994.

Jyotiba Phule, Satsar (The Essence of Truth) September and October rt.

116.

L173 118.

1885, in Y.D. Phadke, Collected Works of Jotiba Phule, Bombay, Maharashtra Rajya Sahitya ani Sanskriti Mandal, 1991, pp. 345-83.

REWRITING HISTORY

Omvedt, Cultural Revolt, pp.111-12.

Himani Banerji, 'Mothers and Daughters: Gender and Class in Educational Proposals for Women and by Women in Colonial

Bengal', Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 5, No. 1, March 1992, pp. 1-30.

See for example D.D. Karve, The New Brahmans; Kumar, Western India, p. 278.

Kumar, Western India, p. 270.

O'Hanlon, Caste, p. 91.

Tucker, 'Early Setting of the Non-Brahmin Diovenaltle p. 144.

O'Hanlon, Caste, p. 93.

Tucker, 'Early Setting of the Non-Brahmin Movement', p. 144.

Ibid; O'Hanlon, Caste, p. 99.

Tucker, 'Early Setting of the Non-Brahmin Movement', pp.

154-55.

J.C. Masselos, Towards Nationalism: Group Affiliations and the 119.

120.

$21:

122}

124.

125; 126. t2/.

128.

122.

Politics of Public Associations in Nineteenth Century Western India, Bombay, Popular Prakashan, 1974, pp. 35-36.

The widow remarriage controversy was to rage in many castes with similar splits in each caste. However, the focus here is only on one,

130. i.e., the Brahmanas, although for purposes of analysis we may draw on others.

Anon., An Essay on the Second Marriages of Widows by a (Donor Brahmin of Nagpore, with an introduction by Lancelot Wilkinson, no publisher, 1841, Manuscript in National Library, Calcutta.

W.M. Kolhatkar, "Widow Remarriage in India', in C.Y. Chintamani 131k 132:

(ed.), Indian Social Reform, Madras, Minerva Press, 1901, p. 294.

Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, Marriage of Hindu Widows (with an introduction by Arabinda Poddar), Calcutta, K.P. Bagchi and Company, 1976, p. vi.

See for example C.Y. Chintamani, Indian Social Reform; Charles Heimsath, /ndian Nationalism and Hindu Social Reform, Princeton,

Princeton University Press, 1964, and S. Natarajan, A Century of Social Reform in India, Bombay, Asia Publishing House, 1959.

133:

134.

133% In order to develop a proper focus on the male viewpoint on widowhood I have summarised the main trends in the positions throughout the nineteenth century rather than confine it to the 60s and 70s when the widow reform movement was in its most controversial stage.

136.

J.C. Ghose (ed.), The English Works of Rammohun Roy, Calcutta, Bhowanipore Oriental Press, 1885, pp. 364-65.

Uma Chakravarti, "Gender, Caste and Labour: The Ideological and Ton

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

Material Structures of Widowhood', in Marty Chen (ed.), Widowhood in India, Delhi, Sage, forthcoming.

Ibid.

An Essay on the Second Marriages of Widows, p. 8.

Marriage of Hindu Widows, p. x.

138.

139.

140.

141.

Calcutta Review, Vol. 25, pp. 351-58, reprinted in Marriage of Hindu Widows, p. 139.

Government of India, Legislative Council Proceedings from January to December, 1856, Vol.

II, p. 438, cited in Heimsath, Indian Nationalism, pp. 83-84.

142.

D.C. Sen in Prabhast, cited in Dagmar Engels, Changing Role of 143.

Women in Bengal, c. 1890-1930, With Special Reference to British and Bengali Discourse, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 1987, p. 69.

Uma Chakrayarti, 'Conceptualising Brahmanical Patriarchy in Early India: Gender, Caste, Class and State', Economic and Political

144.

Weekly, Vol. 28, No. 14, April 3, 1993, pp. 579-585.

The Times, August 15, 1856.

Lancelot Wilkinson, 'Introduction' to Anon., Essay on the Second Marriages of Hindu Widows, pp. 8-9.

Ibid., pp. 9-11.

A comparison between the 'colonial' and 'indigenous' perception of widowhood and 'illicit' sexual activity indicates that there are vital differences between the two. The upper-caste literate male was not, in our view, functioning as an authoritative spokesman of 'colonialism's gendered idioms' as O'Hanlon suggests. More often than not he was deploying the gendered idioms of Brahmanical texts as this exonerated him of participating in acts attributed to the consequences of a widow's repressed sexuality. In this I differ from O'Hanlon (Rosalind O'Hanlon, 'Issues of Widowhood in Colonial

Western India,' in Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash, Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia, Delhi, Oxford University

Press, 1991, p. 102).

Scholars from Nabadwip were also consulted but the position taken was that although there was nothing in the Shastras to prohibit widow marriage it was against the time-honoured customs of the people (Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, Marriage of Hindu Widows,

145.

146.

147.

148.

149.

. Vii).

Taitially the pandits stated that the custom of widow marriage was approved for Shudras but later withdrew sanction for all, when the movement for widow marriage was launched, since the movement was intended for widows of all castes (Vidyasagar, Marriage of Hindu

150.

Widows, pp. vii, 115).

116 REWRITING HISTORY

Two events were crucial in Vidyasagar's life: one, the remarriage of one of his teachers to a young girl who was left a widow soon after the consummation of the marriage; and two, the visit of a young widowed girl to his family home. From the emotional outburst of Vidyasagar's mother after she had talked to the young widow in the inner quarter of the house, it appears that the widow was a victim of her circumstances and may have been seduced. Vidyasagar's mother was obviously moved by the girl's plight, as she came out with tears in her eyes and said to her son, "You have read enough of the Shastras; have you found no sanction of the Shastras for the remarriage of the miserable infant widow?' Vidyasagar's own sympathy for the child widow was more than strongly endorsed by his mother's (Vidyasagar, Marriage of Hindu Widows, p. 113). The bodily mortification and fasting prescribed for widows in Bengal were extremely harsh. Even water was forbidden during the Ekadashi lol; fast. There are accounts of widows licking the moist earth to quench their thirst during this fast in the hot season (personal communication from Tanika Sarkar). That even sons experienced trauma watching their mothers transformed from sumangalis to shaven-headed, defeminised beings is documented in biographical accounts of the nineteenth century( see D.D. Karve (ed.), New

Brahmans, p. 196).

See Radhabai Inamdar et. al., Position of Widows, Essays compiled by the Director of Ethnography for India titled, Experiences of TZ:

Widows and Other Girls, Collection addressed to Sir Herbert Risley, 1911, Eur. MS. Division 356, India Office Library, p. 8.

Such were the emotions expressed by Anandibai Karve's father at the sight of her first-born son, following her controversial remarriage to Professor Karve, opposed not only by the community but also by her mother. When the father was excommunicated by his caste-fellows he explained his position to his children, including two other widows, in these words: 'All my daughters and sons have experienced and known the joys and sorrows of married life. But Baya (Anandibai) has not fully experienced married life. She has committed no sin in remarrying nor we in consenting to the marriage.' Sometime later when he saw Anandibai's first child he took the baby on his lap; while tears of joy flowed from his eyes he cried, 'It is by His (God's) grace that Baya has this beautiful jewel of a boy. It is a wicked custom to prevent child-widow remarriage, thereby depriving our country of those who might become pillars of strength to her (Parvatibai Athavale, Hindu Widow: An Autobiography, tr. by Rev. Justin E. Abbot, Delhi, Reliance

Publishing House, 1986 [Reprint], pp. 18-19).

19:

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

154.

Gopal Hari Deshmukh, Shatapatre no. 99, cited in Stanley Wolpert, Tilak and Gokhale (Ph.D dissertation, re-cited in Heimsath, Indian

Nationalism, p. 102).

Dayaram Gidumal, The Status of Women in India or a Handbook for Hindu Social Reformers, Bombay, Fort Publishers, 1889.

Tbid., p. i.

Tbid., p. ii.

Lancelot Wilkinson, 'Introduction', p. 4.

Gidumal, The Status of Women, p. ii.

Ibid., p. Ixxv.

Tbid., p. \xxvii.

Ibid.

Ibid., p. \xxvi.

Ibid.

155.

156.

157.

158.

E59.

160.

161.

162.

163.

164.

165.

166.

167.

168.

169.

Ibid., p. Ixxiv.

Ibid., p. \xxv.

M.G. Ranade, cited in S. Natarajan, Social Reform, p. 5.

The Times of India Calendar and Directory for 1869, p. 304.

Marriage of Hindu Widows Advocated by the Pathare Reform Association of Bombay, Appendix L, Social and Political Revolution:

Hindu Marriage a Fact, Extracts from Newspapers pp. xiv ff.

(Manuscript, National Library Calcutta); Masselos, Towards Nationalism, pp. 88-90.

Richard Tucker, "From Dharamashastra to Politics', Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 7 No. 1, 1970, p. 333.

Masselos, Towards Nationalism, p. 89.

Social and Political Revolution, pp. xliv ff.

Ibid.

Masselos, Towards Nationalism, pp. 90-91.

Wamanrao Kolhatkar, 'Marriage of Widows', in C.Y. Chintamani 170.

lid.

174.

172.

(ed.), Indian Social Reform, p. 300.

Parvati Athavale, Amandibai Karve's sister, records that it was the discussions at the shastrartha that influenced her father to accept that widow remarriage was permissible. Clearly the debate thus had a cathartic character (Parvati Athavale, Hindu Widow, 1986, p. 17).

Tbid., p. 301.

Tucker, 'From Dharmashastra', p. 335.

Kolhatkar, 'Marriage of Widows', p. 305.

Tarabai Shinde, Stri Purusha Tulana, p. 75.

A striking aspect of the entire widow remarriage controversy during 176.

177.

178.

Wee 180.

181. this early phase was that no women featured in the debate. Even the reformers had no women in their ranks; thus, in an issue that crucially affected their lives no women spoke at least in any audible

REWRITING HISTORY

way. It appears that upper-caste women, the objects of the reform, were tied up in larger social forces over which they had no control and which they could not shape.

Y.D. Phadke, Social Reform Movements in Maharashtra, Delhi, Maharashtra Information Centre, 1989, p. 20.

Gidumal, The Status of Women, p. booxxviil.

C.Y.Chintamani, Indian Social Reform, p. 306.

Native Opinion, 11 January 1871 (cited in Tucker, 'Dharmashastra', p.

338).

_ Ramabai Ranade, Amchya Ayushatil Kahi Athavani (tr.) by Kusumvati Deshpande, Ranade: His Wife's Reminiscences, Delhi,

Publications Division, 1963, pp. 33-34.

B.N. Motivala, Karsondas Mulji: A Biographical Study, Bombay, Karsondas Mulji Centenary Celebration Committee, 1935, pp. 215

182.

183.

184.

185.

186.

187. ff., S. Natarajan, Social Reform in India, pp. 60-62.

Chintamani, Indian Social Reform, p. 187.

Tucker, 'Dharmashastra', p. 337.

Masselos, Towards Nationalism, pp. 96ff.

Tucker, 'Early Setting of the Non-Brahmin Movement', p. 147.

188.

189.

190.

191.

197; 193.

Richard Cashman, The Myth, pp. 27-28.

David Hardiman (ed.), Peasant Resistance in India, 1858-1914, Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 29.

R.C. Majumdar (ed.), British Paramountcy and Indian Renaissance, Bombay, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1963, p. 909; also see Johnson,

'Chitpavan Brahmins', p. 109.

Ramabai Ranade, Reminiscences, pp. 51-52.

Tucker, 'Early Setting of the Non-Brahmin Movement', p. 154.

O'Hanlon, Caste, pp. 190-92, 258.

194.

195.

196. ir 198.

Quarterly Journal of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, Vol. 5 for 1879-97, cited in Johnson, 'Chitpavan Brahmins', pp. 109-10.

For an extreme articulation of Brahmanophobia see Arthur Crawford, Our Troubles in Poona and the Deccan, pp. 77ff., 85, 115.

Ibid., pp. 136ff.

, Report of the Director of Public Instruction in the Bombay Presidency for the Year 1877-78, Appendix D, p. 81 cited in Cashman, The 199.

200.

PANNE Myth, p. 41.

Cashman, The Myth, p. 218.

Professor D.K. Karve's memoirs describe the way poor Brahmanas struggled to educate their sons so that they could find jobs in the administration (D.D. Karve, New Brahmans, pp. 19-22, 112, 115).

Omvedt, Cultural Revolt, pp. 125-27.

Cashman, The Myth, pp. 37-38.

Ibid., p. 39.

202.

203.

204.

ZOD 206.

Caste Contestation, Class Formation, Nationalism and Gender

Native Opinion, 11 July 1869, and 8 August 1869.

Natarajan, Social Reform, p. 63.

V.N. Mandlik, 'Introduction', The Vyavahara Mayukha, Bombay, 207.

208.

209.

1880, p. ii, cited in Tucker, 'Dharmashastra', p. 339.

Writings and Speeches of the Late Honourable Rao Saheb Vishwanath Narayan Mandlik, Bombay, 1896, pp. 129-30, cited in Tucker,

"'Dharmashastra', p. 339.

Native Opinion, 19 March 1865, cited in Tucker, 'Early Setting of the Non-Brahmin Movement', p. 154, n. 4.

Tucker, 'Early Setting of the Non-Brahmin Movement', p. 144.

Cashman, The Myth, p. 40.

Ibid., p. 38.

Mahratta, | February 1885.

Cashman, The Myth, pp. 148-50.

Joan Leopold, 'The Aryan Theory of Race', Indian Economic and 210.

211.

212.

215.

214.

215.

216.

217.

Social History Review, Vol. 7 No. 2, June 1970, pp. 271-97, p. 278.

Ibid., p. 281.

M.G. Ranade, in M.B. Kolasker (ed.), Religious and Social Reform, quoted in J. Leopold, "The Aryan Theory', pp. 279-81.

B.G. Tilak, The Orion, or Researches in the Antiquity of the Veda, Poona, Tilak Brothers, 1893, p. 464.

M.G. Ranade, The Rise of Maratha Power, pp. 5-6, cited in Cashman, The Myth, p. 103.

Cashman, The Myth, pp. 105-06.

218.

219% 220.

221; ade £22.

224.

Ibid., pp. 14-16.

V.K. Chiplunkar, Nibandhamala, Poona, 1926, p. 992, cited in Cashman, The Myth, p. 8.

M.G. Ranade, Miscellaneous Writings of Mr. Justice M.G. Ranade, Bombay, Manektala and Company, 1915, p. 126.

Cashman, The Myth, pp. 200-02. It is significant that even at the time when Tilak was making political use of Shivaji the question of conceding Kshatriya status to him as a Maratha was resisted by the conservative Brahmanas including Tilak. While Shivaji was a 'brave' man, all his bravery, it was argued, did not give him right to a status that very 'nearly approached that of a Brahmin' (emphasis added). ji ip 226.

Further, the fact that Shivaji worshipped the Brahmanas in no way altered social relations, 'since it was as Shudra that he did it — as a Shudra the servant, if not the slave, of the Brahmin' (Gordon

Johnson, 'Chitpavan Brahmins', p. 114).

Cashman, The Myth, p. 185.

Ibid., p. 201.

Omvedt, Cultural Revolt, p. 170.

Cashman, The Myth, pp. 168-170.

L2L/ 228.

Lees 230.

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PART TWO The establishment and consolidation of the colonial state, its repercussions on traditional elites and the social processes it generated affecting castes, the process of class formation, and the construction of history and of nation, were the backdrop for major changes in gender relations in the nineteenth century. Part Two is focused centrally on gender. Among the issues addressed here are: in what way did the colonial state's new structures, transform and reorganise gender; what was the new agenda being set for women by paternalistic reformers of the nineteenth century; was this agenda common to all women or aimed only at particular categories among them? How was it received by women; how and in what way was their 'consent' produced; to what extent did women share in the new agenda and act as willing reproducers of class and gender norms; and, finally, to what extent did women withhold consent to the dominant model of patriarchy emerging in the late nineteenth century.

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