Nationalism and Social Group Interfaces PDF

Nationalism and social group: interfaces
Subject: History
Lesson: Nationalism and social group: interfaces
Course Developers
Nationalism and social groups: inferfaces

Author : Prof. Prathama Banerjee
Centre for Studies in Developing Societies, Rajpur Road,
Delhi
Language Editor: Swapna Liddle

Formating Editor: Ashutosh Kumar
Institute of lifelong learning, University of Delhi

Table of contents
Chapter 10: Nationalism and social groups: interfaces

 10.1: Landlords; professionals; business groups; middle classes
 10.2: Peasants
 10.3: Tribals
 10.4: Labour
 10.5: Dalits
 10.6: Women
 Summary
 Exercises
 Glossary
 Further readings

10.1: Landlords; professionals; business groups; middle

classes
Why study the elite?
The most touchy aspect of any national history is that, while a nation is named after a
„people‟ as a whole, it is always ruled by an elite. The fact that the rich and the powerful
have always dominated in history does not quite refute the importance of this fact. For in
times before nationalism – when there were no nations, only lands, countries, kingdoms
– elites were seen as „natural‟ rulers. Commoners of course rebelled; but they did not
contest the fact that kingly or princely traits could only be claimed by the uncommon –
by those with extraordinary claims of blood, lineage, wisdom, divinity or simply valour.
Any and everybody did not have the right to rule. Nationalism, however, grew out of the
idea of a „people‟. One could even say that nationalism and democracy were historically
simultaneous impulses. After all, both nationalism and democracy are defined as „self-
rule‟ by a people. The birth of the nation as a political form, thus, was also the birth of
the figure of the citizen – who could claim a nation by virtue of being born in it, but more
importantly, could partake in its government by virtue of simply her nationality.
This is precisely where a nation is always already in tension with itself. While the poor,
the dalit, the woman, the adivasi, and the minority are all potential rulers of the nation,
at least in principle, in reality they are excluded by national elites. And yet the latter‟s
elitism does not have the comfort of a natural right or condition. In fact, their elitism is
highly fragile and contested. National elites, in the face of continuous democratic
questioning, have to justify their pre-eminence in newer and newer terms – education in
the 19th century, modernity and advancement in early 20th century, technical, scientific
and managerial expertise in the late 20th-21st century – so that they can claim to
represent and speak for people better than people can for themselves.
In other words, elitism is not a timeless fact of human history, but a changing, historical
question and must be studied as such. Some say that elites must be studied because
they control a nation‟s destiny. Some say that elites must not be studied, because they
are a miniscule minority and say nothing about the majority of the people of the nation.
Neither position is really tenable. For one must understand that elites, by virtue of being
elite, live vis a vis the non-elite; and it is this relationship that must be the subject of our
analysis. A study of the ways in which elites seek legitimacy and dominance actually
reflects on the nature of the nation‟s polity as a whole. A study of elite discourses also
makes available to us insurgent or rebellious ideas of the poor and the marginalized,
because their voices, otherwise silenced and lost to history, leave their traces in the
documents and records of elites who imprison, fight and seek to defeat them. (Guha
1994) In this lecture, we shall discuss Indian elites, namely, landlords, middle classes
and capitalists, from this relational perspective. And all through our discussion we shall
try to remember three things.
One, that elites in themselves are not a homogenous group. Thus, upper-caste women
are not elite in the same way as upper-caste men; and middle-class dalits, middle-class
Muslims and middle-class, upper-caste Hindus have very different lives and identities.
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Additionally, the history of elites is also a history of change, of the decline of old elites
such as zamindars and the rise of new ones, such as businessmen, often, interestingly,
with the help of the non-elite.
Two, Indian nationalism initially emerged as an elite phenomenon, though anti-

colonialism did not. Anti-colonialism was indeed spearheaded by peasants, adivasis,
dalits and other non-elite sections, much before the rise of self-conscious nationalism in
the second half of the 19th century.
Three, nationalism is itself a perpetual tussle between democratic and anti-democratic

impulses. Because nationalism demands an unconditional unity of a people, nationalism
often tries to force a cultural as well as political homogeneity across real-life differences.
This necessarily means that dominant groups impose their own class, community,
regional, even linguistic markers upon all other groups and claim these markers as not
particular, but national markers. Everybody, it is asserted, must match up to these
(Hindu, male, upper-caste, English/Hindi-speaking, urban) norms because they are
national norms. Nationalism thus becomes the language of dominance and exclusion,
and eventually, of a coercive and disciplinary nation-state, which tends to call all
different ways of life and all resistance movements „anti-national‟. In this, nationalism is
inherently elitist and anti-democratic. At the same time, there is no denying the fact that
critiques of homogenizing nationalisms too often emerge in the name of the nation – the
„real‟ nation of the poor and the dispossessed. Movements amongst dalits, labourers,
adivasis etc often use the language of citizenship and of civil, democratic and political
rights. Alternative imaginations of nationalism, therefore, can and still do offer a
powerful rhetoric of democratization. (Pandey 2009)
Landlords
By late 18th century, the nature of landlordism had changed in India, under colonial
influence. We know that in late 18 th century, the East India Company made a Permanent
revenue settlement with zamindars of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, on the argument that
zamindars were the only group with clear-cut rights to land-ownership, land-
management and revenue-collection. Zamindars were even seen as similar to the
traditional aristocracy and gentry of the English countryside, with similar investment in
the improvement of agricultural land and in larger, civilizational matters. This artificial
administrative importance given to the zamindar led to a new kind of economic
dominance of the landlord class under colonialism – thus denying the fact that earlier in
India, there were multiple and overlapping land-rights shared between various classes of
peasants, landlords and even non-agriculturists. The landlord was thus reinvented as the
singular, propertied, respectable group, who could „pacify‟ the turbulent peasant masses
of India and establish a civilized „rule of property‟ under the British Raj. (Guha 1963)
Landlords became all the more influential after 1857, because colonial rulers now saw
them as the main buffers between peasant rebels and the state. Landlords were
portrayed as „natural leaders‟ of the masses, and the Imperial Durbar of 1877 in Delhi,
where Queen Victoria assumed the title of the Empress of India, gave native princes and
big landlords priority. The British Indian Association, the first major voluntary
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organization in India, was established by landlords in 1851. It became particularly active

after the Indian Councils Act of 1861, and successfully lobbied for landlord
representation in the legislative councils. Landlords were nominated into the legislature
and their importance would continue till about 1892, when a limited electoral system
would lead to the progressive dominance of the middle classes in the councils at the cost
of landlords.
Landlords therefore were largely allies of the colonial state. However, in the 19 th century,
certain landlord elements did play an important political role – though not quite in
nationalist terms. Thus, Raja Rammohan Ray, an upper-caste landed magnate and
reformer, argued, somewhat in the tradition of classic liberalism, that along with free
speech and parliamentary representation, property was a condition of political liberty.
He argued that, permanent property-rights should be extended to raiyats (peasant-
cultivators) in the same way that it had been extended to zamindars in the Permanent
Settlement. At the same time, he also argued that civilized Europeans should be allowed
to settle and own land in India. In other words, he was not making a nationalist
argument. In fact, he imagined a liberal British empire, where both Indians and the
English would be free, rightful and property-owning subjects. Till about mid-19th century,
many other landed individuals – Dwarakanath Tagore being another – imagined India to
be in this way part of a dynamic global empire of trade and productivity. This political
dream, of course, never took off because the colonizer was not going to share imperial
„citizenship‟ rights with the colonized. Colonial rulers racially monopolized economic
resources and undercut the potential economic enterprise of landed and commercial
Indian interests – the decline of Dwarakanath Tagore was a great example of this.
Landlords, and native princes, thus, were meant to remain as only subordinate loyalists
to the white man, and act as bulwarks against popular revolts.
Even with the Permanent Settlement, the Company-state saw zamindars as rivals to its
own sovereignty, because zamindars often functioned as kings themselves and
sometimes even led anti-colonial uprisings. So colonizers sought to curb their political,
juridical and mercantile jurisdictions. Indian landlords could no longer keep private
armies, act as magistrates in their own territories or extract customs, excise and other
such mercantile duties, which were all seen as the sole provenance of the colonial state.
(Sen 1998) In other words, while zamindars became economically dominant under
colonialism, their extra-economic powers were greatly clipped. By late 19 th century,
landlords‟ powers were further reduced in the face of powerful peasant movements and
in the face of the rise of an upper/middle peasantry, who benefited from the
commercialization of agriculture, from colonial tenancy legislation and who took to
money-lending in addition to collecting rent and selling produce. Very often the rise of
this affluent peasantry was also the rise of nationalism in the countryside, at the cost of
„high landlordism‟. Additionally, mass nationalism often turned into powerful movements
of poorer peasantry against zamindari rent. And the nationalist leadership had to
promise that on independence, the national state would abolish the zamindari system by
law. By early 20th century, therefore, even though many landlords continued to enjoy
immense wealth, there also emerged an imagination of great old zamindars on the
decline.

Value addition: interesting detail

Declining zamindars
The tragic imagination of the decline of old zamindars and of their culture of
aesthetic patronage produced many poignant literary works. The classic image
would be of a zamindar who refused to turn commercial and usurious, in contrast
to the noveau riche in the countryside, who benefited from colonial commercial
connections and were jealous of the gradually vanishing elegance of the
traditional landed elite. One of the most beautiful depictions of this theme, with
great classical music, was Satyajit Ray‟s 1958 film Jalsaghar. Here is a short clip
from the film.
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4HlVxrRjH0
Middle classes
In England, the middle classes or the bourgeoisie were seen as the main force of
historical change, that brought feudalism to an end and inaugurated capitalist modernity,
with its values of economic enterprise and political liberty. The Indian middle classes
drew upon some of this historical justification in their rise to prominence, and yet their
own history was very different. The Indian middle classes were not an entrepreneurial
group. They emerged as an outgrowth of colonial education and employment, and in that
they were indeed products of colonial rule. They, therefore, overwhelmingly suffered a
subordinate status under colonialism. However, they also imbibed, through colonial
education, global ideologies of freedom and equality and turned these western ideas
against the colonial rulers themselves. In this, the middle classes were indeed the most
vocal and articulate critics of colonial rule. But they were also, perforce, the most
anxiety-ridden group and the most critical of its own colonial origin.
The 19th century was replete with popular discourses about chakuri (servitude in colonial
employment) and kaliyuga (the evil epoch following satya, treta and dvapar yuga-s).
These satirized the urban alienation and moral decline of educated men, who earned
their living as inferior clerks in colonial offices and lost their manliness and authentic
lifestyles in the process. (Sarkar 1997) In a way, it was this anxiety that lay behind the
Indian middle classes‟ particular relationship to the nation‟s women. We shall discuss the
centrality of the „women‟s question‟ in the self-definition of the Indian middle classes in
lesson 10.6. Suffice it to say here that the experience of colonial subordination in public
life led the middle-classes to imagine the domestic/private sphere as the authentic
„interior‟ of the nation, where the nation‟s women nurtured the true spirit and culture of
Indianness. The rise of the middle classes and of nationalism was also therefore the rise
to dominance of an ideology of domesticity and of the reinvention of women as the
embodiment of national tradition.
The peasant and the poor were also central to the self-definition of the Indian middle
classes. In Bengal, for instance, through the 19th century, the middle classes tried to
fashion themselves as bhadralok or gentlefolk, in opposition to the vulgar peasantry.
They even sought to prevent women of the bhadralok households from interacting with
service women of the poorer castes – traders, barbars, entertainers etc – in the name of
middle-class morality and decency. (Banerjee 1990) The rise of literary Bengali too was
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a story of the Sanskritization of the language and of the elimination of colloquial and
popular, including Persianized and local, vocabularies from it. Significantly, most middle-
class Bengalis retained landed interests in the countryside – because they came from
relatively affluent rural, landed families, who could support their sons to come to the
city, study and become lawyers, doctors, civil servants etc. It was not accidental that in
Bengal, therefore, many from the middle classes retained pro-landlord positions – such
as during the Bengal Tenancy Act of 1889, which sought to give occupancy rights to
peasant tenants, or during the swadeshi movement of 1905-10 when middle classes
coerced poor peasants into boycotting cheap foreign cloth and buying costly desi textiles,
even at the cost of the peasants‟ own bankruptcy.
The middle classes sometimes championed the cause of the poor and the peasant – such
as that of the indigo cultivators or the indentured labourers in tea-plantations. But this
support would come easy only when the exploiters were white planters, allowing
attitudes of straight-forward anti-colonialism. The middle classes also supported peasant
movements against „high landlordism‟ of traditional zamindars. By late 19 th-early 20th
century, colonial tenancy legislation had given occupancy rights to the more affluent and
middle peasantry. They also benefited from colonial commercial agriculture and money
lending but remained unconstrained by any rights given to sharecroppers or agrarian
labour below them. This middle/upper peasantry, called jotedars in many parts of
Bengal, would emerge as rural/mufassil gentle-folk, and sometimes using an anti-
zamindar rhetoric, start English schools and become active in the local literary public
sphere and in municipal and local politics.
Value addition: from the sources

Middle classes and the village
“The middle class is the backbone of society on earth. Whatever the case in other
countries, in Bengal the origin and growth of the middle class is to be traced to
land-rights. The zamindars may be the proprietors of the land, but hitherto it is
the middle class who has exercised authority on land.”
Source: Amrita Bazaar Patrika, 25 June 1876 quoted in Ray, Rajat. 1984.
Social Conflict and Political Unrest in Bengal. Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 53.
By the 20th century, a substantial group of discontented, educated men emerged from
amongst these rural middle classes, faced first with the global economic crisis of 1907
and then the world wars. These were the men active in nationalism from swadeshi times
onwards, and led to the spread of nationalism beyond the cities into local towns, ganj-s
and villages. Needless to say, these middle-class nationalists remained in an uneasy
relationship with movements amongst the lower peasantry – such as the Namashudra
movement amongst the low-caste Chandalas or movements amongst Muslim peasants in
east Bengal. Thus in the Bengal Legislative Council, the relationship between
Namasudras and higher caste nationalists would become increasingly bitter 1920s
onwards, where Namasudra MLCs would often combine with Muslim and European MLCs
against nationalist agitators.
Apart from gender and class, therefore, the Indian middle classes were also marked in
caste and religious terms. English educated sections were mainly upper caste Hindus –
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Brahmans, Kayasthas and Baidyas in Bengal, the Chitpavan Brahmans (and Parsis) in
Maharashtra, Tamil Brahmins in Madras. At the same time, they also came from groups
that were regionally dominant – from colonial presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay and
Madras or traditionally dominant urban areas such as Pune and Dacca. Often this was at
the cost of other regional identities such as Bengalis at the cost of Oriyas and Assamese,
Maharashtrians at the cost of Gujaratis and Tamils at the cost of Telegus and Malayalis.
The politics of region and locality thus indelibly mixed with the politics of caste and
religion in defining the social composition and role of the middle classes.
The middle classes would remain painfully aware of their distance and alienation from
the popular classes. Therefore, along with their unease with the peasant and the poor,
the middle classes would also cultivate a relationship of desire with them. Thus in late
19th century, Bengali middle classes would flock to Sri Ramakrishna – an illiterate
peasant mystic – in hope of discovering an earthy and authentic Bengali-ness which
would allay their colonial, urban alienation. In early 20 th century, literary men would
seek to discover and document peasant/„folk‟ cultural traditions as the true repository of
Indian-ness. In mid-20th century, communists and socialists would desperately seek
inspiration from popular/peasant musical and dramatic forms, seen as more authentic
both in nationalist and revolutionary terms. On the other hand, middle classes would
also practice communalism – arguing that upper-castes must befriend dalits and adivasis
in order to forge a larger Hindu unity, which would prevent Hindus being overtaken
numerically by the Muslims. (Datta 1999)
Business classes
Middle classes felt that India‟s subordination was the result of England‟s commercial and
industrial supremacy. 19th century economic nationalism – spearheaded by Dadabhai
Naoroji, Romesh Chandra Dutt etc – had argued that colonialism drained India of
economic resources and prevented the growth of indigenous industry and enterprise.
(Chandra 1966) Alongside, middle classes developed two self-criticisms. One, that
„backward‟ peoples of India, especially adivasis, had no economic rationality and
therefore could not think in modern ways. And two, that middle classes had themselves
failed to show economic enterprise – because they remained caught up in colonial
employment and in idle investment in land and „company papers‟. (Banerjee 2006) Early
20th century nationalism therefore tried hard to develop swadeshi enterprise and
encourage the middle classes to pool in their small savings and create national capital,
as it were. Swadeshi business, especially of the Bengali variety, never took off beyond a
point, but it did produce the question of the relationship between nationalism and
capital, a question that would remain highly contentious well into the after-independence
years.
The relationship between colonialism, nationalism and the business classes changed
through time and also differed between communities. The traditional merchant
communities of India - Banias and Jains of Gujarat and north India, Marwaris, Parsis,
Nattukottai Chettiars of Madras, and Lohanas and Bhatias of the Kutch-Kathiawar-Sindh
belt – generally speaking, benefited from colonial commercial networks, both global and
national. They were therefore not necessarily anti-colonial. Amongst these communities,
some like the Parsis, made a transition from trade to industry – not only in areas, such
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as iron and steel etc, in which colonial capital was not particularly interested, but also in
traditional areas like cotton, where a huge global market had opened up by the 20 th
century. Communities which moved into industry benefited from global economic
upheavals like the world wars, which constrained European industry and opened up
space for indigenous players, both globally and in domestic markets. Communities which
continued to be traders, however, suffered owing to war-time price and currency
fluctuations. Trading communities therefore largely seemed more sympathetic to
nationalism than industrialists. But then again, certain industrialist groups such as the
Ahmedabad cotton-mill owners could see that nationalist strategies of boycott and
swadeshi could mean more of their products being sold in place of foreign textiles. They
would therefore often support nationalism. Newer communities, traditionally agrarian,
could and did also join the business classes. The best example of this were the Patidars
of Maharashtra – who empowered themselves through a combination of nationalist and
caste agitation, developed institutional forms such as cooperatives and became
prosperous in the sugar industry.
Value addition: did you know?

Capital, caste and the south
While it seems that the most successful Indian capitalists were from western and
northern India and from traditional mercantile castes, the case of south India
actually tells us a different story of a socially diverse and democratized spread of
capital. It was partly because of the power of lower-caste movements that capital
itself was democratized here, but also because of a kind of a traditional „vaishya
vacuum‟.
Capital in the south is not identifiable with any exclusive ethnic group. In the
sugar industry are EID Parry (Nattukottai Chettiar), Sakthi, Bannari Amman and
Dharani Sugars (Gounder), Rajshree Sugars (Naidu), Thiru Arooran Sugars
(Vellala Mudaliar), KCP and Andhra Sugars (Kamma), GMR Industries (Komati),
Gayatri Sugars (Reddy), Ponni and Ugar Sugar (Brahmin), Empee Sugars
(Ezhava) and Godavari Sugar (Gujarati Lohana). The same diversity is evident in
the media: Eenadu (Kamma), Deccan Chronicle (Reddy), TV-
9 (Raju), DailyThanthi (Nadar), Hindu/Dinamalar (Brahmin),
SunNetwork (IsaiVellalar), MalayalaManorama (SyrianChristian),
Asianet(Nair), DeccanHerald/Prajavani (Idiga), Kerala Kaumudi ( Ezhava)
and Mathrubhumi (Jain). Isai Vellalars are traditionally temple musicians and
dancers, OBCs.The Idigas are a toddy-tapping community from Karnataka
analogous to the Ezhavas of Kerala and Nadars of Tamil Nadu.
The North, on the other hand, presents a total contrast. The bulk of its farmers
producing sugarcane, wheat, rice, milk, oilseed or cotton are Jat, Ahir (Yadav),
Gujjar, Kurmi, Saini, Bishnoi or Koeri, while the industrialists are overwhelmingly
Bania/Marwari and Khatri. The contrast is clearest when one looks at Green
Revolution Punjab, whose Jat Sikh peasantry is supposed to be the most
progressive and commercial of the country‟s farming communities. Yet the
famous Sikh industrialists that come to mind immediately – Bhai Mohan Singh,
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Raunaq Singh, Mohan Singh Oberoi – are all Khatris. The cycle-kings of Ludhiana,
are also Khatris, while its textile and hosiery tycoons – be it the various Oswal
factions or the newer roups like Abhishek Industries and Duke India Fashions –
are Bania/Marwari. So marked is this contradiction between country and town
that instances of the northern agrarian castes doing a Gounder, Kamma or Naidu
are few and far between. The only genuinely big Jat businessman today is the
real-estate mogul, Kushal Pal Singh of DLF, all other major northern players in
construction are Bania/Marwari(Ansals, Omaxe, Parsvnath, Eldeco) and Khatri
(HDIL, Anant Raj Industries).
There are a number of factors behind this. One is the historically entrenched, all-
pervading presence of the various Bania castes and Khatris in the northern
business landscape. The Bania complex encompassed the entire business chain
here: from the village grocer-cum-moneylender and aggregator of primary
produce to the commission-agent at the mandi (the procurement market), the big
city wholesale broker and financier, and the final-stage manufacturer, exporter or
distributor. Not that there were no equivalent vaishya groups in the South; the
difference is that never had the Chettiars exercised so much sway over the
commodity and money markets as the northern Bania. In fact, the Chettiars were
more into money lending and financing of trade rather than trading per se, and
later migrated away from Madras to Ceylon and South-East Asia. This
„vaishya vacuum‟ was filled often by even Syrian Christians and Muslim traders of
Arab descent. In a relatively open field of this kind, it was not impossible then for
the enterprising Kamma or Gounder „capitalist-farmer‟ to turn „farmer-capitalist‟.
The business environment was less friendly in the North, rendering the journey
from the farm to the boardroom impossible. The surpluses from agriculture here
are, therefore, invested usually in petty businesses like transport, petrol pumps,
property, cinema theaters and marriage halls.
Source: Harish Damodaran “Banias and Beyond: the dynamics of caste
and big business in modern India”, CASI Working Paper Series,
University of Pennsylvania, 2008, 27-30,
http://www2.ssc.upenn.edu/research/papers/WP-Damodaran.pdf
In other words, the business classes of India were internally variegated and while not
always anti-colonial, could sometimes be pro-nationalist. This became increasingly the
case in the late 1920s and 30s – as the global economy slumped leading to the great
depression of 1929 and the colonial state showed „imperial preference‟ for European
capital, despite giving Indian capitalists representation in the Legislative council as an
„interest group‟. More importantly, the Indian business groups began acting as a
somewhat unified „class in itself‟, in response to the growth of working-class politics in
India, which became really the most important factor in deciding the relationship
between capitalists and nationalism. 1920s onwards, nationalism became an agitational
mass movement. In that, nationalism often appeared as a threat to the business
classes. Thus, during Non-cooperation, while cotton merchants supported boycott and
contributed to Tilak Swaraj Fund, an Anti-Non-cooperation Society was started by R. D.
Tata and Purushottamdas Thakurdas. Again, in 1928-29, when the Girni Kamgar Union
led a series of labour strikes in Bombay, Dorabji Tata proposed the formation of an Indo-
European political formation of capitalists for a global fight against communism and
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socialism. In fact, in 1933, Tata and Mody collaborated with colonial capitalists to form
the Employers Federation of India against trade unions.
And yet, given that working classes had been irrevocably mobilized, it seemed not
enough to be merely anti-nationalist. The business classes found it imperative to try to
influence and control the Congress and develop an alliance with leaders such as Patel,
Rajagopalachari, Rajendra Prasad and above all Gandhi – because these leaders, unlike
others such as Nehru or Subhas Bose, openly stood against socialism and communism.
In the 1930s and 40s, therefore, Indian capitalists would develop a strategic relationship
with the Congress. Gandhi, despite being mass leader par excellence, was paradoxically
the one who turned out to be the best bet for Indian capital. This was because, given his
doctrine of non-violence, he generally came out against excessively militant working-
class action. This was also because of his theory of „trusteeship‟, by which he meant that
the rich held their wealth on behalf of the poor and therefore were meant to be not
enemies but selfless benefactors of the less privileged. This doctrine was clearly far more
charitable to the rich and the wealthy than the Marxist doctrine of class struggle.
Of course, Gandhi‟s own alliance with the business classes too was strategic – the
capitalists contributed funds to his social reconstruction programmes, bolstered him
against rivals within the Congress who spouted the socialist rhetoric and in return,
Gandhi included business issues in his list of nationalist demands to the colonial state.
So much so that in the perception of many communists of the time, Gandhi was literally
a capitalist agent. But really it would be quite unfair to see Gandhi as sole mediator
between capitalists and the national movement. After all, when the Congress came to
power in the provincial ministries in 1937-38, faced with increasing mass agitation and
expectation, the Congress in general showed an anti-labour face, beginning with the
Bombay Trades Disputes Act of 1938 which was heavily tilted against working-class
strike-action. This was good news for the business classes in general. (Markovitz 1985)
Indeed, when the Congress formed the National Planning Committee, it included
prominent industrialists in it. While planning was the product of the socialist thinking of
Nehru, the industrialists included were the very ones who had signed the Bombay
Manifesto, just two years earlier, against the socialist imagination of Nehru and others.
In fact, in 1944 industrialists independently produced the Bombay Plan which would
greatly contribute to the five-year plans of independent India. Clearly, as independence
seemed imminent, the Indian business classes saw the advantage of being involved in
planning future industrial and economic policy and ensuring that the independent Indian
state would facilitate, subsidize and promote new channels of investment and profit.
(Zachariah 2005)
10.2: Peasants
The paradox of the peasant
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Perhaps the most perplexed political question of the 19 th and 20th centuries has been the
question of peasants in modernity. This is because modernity is by definition seen as
synonymous with industrialism and capitalism. It is assumed that with modernity,
societies industrialize and erstwhile peasants get transformed into manufacturing and
service people. Modern politics consequently gets imagined as the politics of the urban
bourgeois and working classes. How then does one deal with the fact that even today
peasants constitute the majority of the population of India, indeed of the world? Indeed,
how does one deal with the very fact of Indian nationalism, which admittedly drew its
strength from large-scale participation of peasants but paradoxically continued to
imagine the post-1947 Indian nation as necessarily moving towards a modern, industrial
future?

Peasant and bourgeois politics
Partha Chatterjee has talked of a structure of „duality‟ in our nationalist mass
movement.
“On the one hand was the domain of the formally organized political parties and
associations, moving within the institutional processes of the bourgeois state
forms introduced by colonial rule and seeking to use their representative power
over the mass of the people to replace the colonial state by a bourgeois nation-
state. On the other hand was the domain of peasant politics where beliefs and
actions did not fit into the grid of “interests” and “aggregation of interests” that
constituted the world of bourgeois representative politics.
…[T]he meeting of these two domains of politics was marked by an unresolved

contradiction. There was undoubtedly a coming together of the two domains, so
that the organization, ideology, and programs of the formally constituted political
domain underwent considerable transformation with the entry of a mass peasant
element, just as the peasantry too became aware of an entirely new world of
political issues, languages, leaders and forms of action. And yet the very union of
these domains was of a form which required that they be kept apart. …[W]hile
the peasants became aware of the hitherto unknown world of nationalist
agitation, they made sense of it not in terms of the discursive forms of modern
bourgeois politics but rather by translating them into their own codes, so that the
language of nationalism underwent quite a radical transformation of meaning in
the peasant domain of politics. The meeting of the two domains did not therefore
mean that the first domain was able to absorb and appropriate its other within a
single homogeneous unity [of nationalism]; the unity itself remained fragmented
and fraught with tension.”
Source: Chatterjee, Partha. 1994. „The nation and its peasants‟. In The
Nation and its Fragments. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 159-60.
12

Perhaps the most influential political opinion, which saw the peasant as a pre-modern
residue in modern times, was that of Marxism. Marxism believed the industrial working
class to be the most politically revolutionary class and the peasantry to be pre-modern,
backward and even pre-political – which had to be educated, mobilized and politicized
through outside interventions by intellectuals, middle classes and workers‟ parties.
Congress leaders like Nehru, Indian communists and early Marxist historians of India all
more or less believed in this negative imagination of the peasantry. Yet there was no
getting away from the fact that the Indian national movement needed mass participation
of the peasantry if it had to be effective at all; just as there was no getting away from
the fact that even before bourgeois nationalism emerged in India in late 19 th century,
peasants had already fought many anti-colonial battles. Both Indian politics and Indian
history-writing therefore has had to deal with this fundamental question – of how to
think about the peasantry in modernity.
Gandhi and the peasant
Any general account of modern India sees Gandhi‟s entry into politics as the critical pro-
peasant moment in Indian nationalism. Till then the self-proclaimed Indian nationalist
was either a Western-educated, middle-class constitutionalist or an individual, militant,
swadeshi revolutionary. Neither talked any kind of mass movement and their attitude vis
á vis the peasantry was at best faltering and uneasy. The best example of this was the
swadeshi movement in Bengal, when middle-class nationalists alienated poor peasants
by forcing them to boycott cheap foreign cloth and buy costly indigenous textiles, all in
the name of nationalism and patriotism. Gandhi, however, brought a different idiom into
Indian nationalism, through his anti-industrial and anti-West rhetoric. In a total reversal
of modern imaginations of industrial modernity, Gandhi popularized the imagination of a
peasant-centric and village-based civilization of harmony, self-sufficiency, discipline and
non-violence.

Gandhi and Hind Swaraj
Gandhi‟s 1909 text Hind Swaraj offered a scathing damnation of modern
industrial civilization, including of doctors, lawyers, railways etc. For the artisan
ruined by factory industry, for the peasants for whom the law-courts were a trap
and city hospitals a trauma, for the migrant to the city, who grew nostalgic about
his village home – this anti-industrial theme had great attraction. In addition,
Gandhi popularized spinning and khadi, set up ashrams, rural reconstruction and
later Harijan welfare programmes – all this created a network of rural bases for
him. He also carefully crafted a personal image – traveling third class, performing
publicly manual and menial labour, speaking in simple Hindustani, wearing only a
loin-cloth since 1921, using images from Tulsidasi Ramayana – which appealed to
the rural masses, at least in north India. All this was undoubtedly a significant
break from earlier languages and styles of nationalist leadership in India.
But no less important were Gandhi‟s well-thought out political strategies of

satyagraha and ahimsa. Until Gandhi, middle-class nationalists had imagined
13

mass movements as violent, disorderly, uncontrolled uprisings by peasants and

the poor. But the Gandhian strategies talked of a controlled and disciplined form
of mass movement, regulated by a leader‟s own uncompromised moral judgment.
The satyagraha model of controlled mass participation therefore became
acceptable to urban business groups as well as to locally dominant and richer
sections of the peasantry, all of whom stood to lose out if a nationalist political
struggle turned into uninhibited and violent social revolution in the countryside.
Starting with the famous Chauri Chaura incident in non-cooperation times,
Gandhi would repeatedly withdraw and prevent mass peasant action, even as he
would often inspire it.
Source: Sarkar, Sumit 1983. Popular Movements and Middle Class
Leadership in Late Colonial India. Calcutta: K P Bagchi, 41-43.
Figure 10.2.1: Gandhi‟s famous image as a peasant leader at his charkha

Source: http://www.treehugger.com/gandhi-charkha.jpg
14

Figure 10.2.2: Gandhi, talking to peasants

Source:
http://images.encarta.msn.com/xrefmedia/sharemed/targets/images/pho/t040/T040809
A.jpg
Yet one can raise many questions about the adequacy of a Gandhi-centric understanding
of peasant struggles in modern India. It was mainstream nationalist history-writing
which pitched Gandhi and Gandhism as the basis of the Indian peasantry‟s relationship
with nationalism. But even a superficial history of the Indian national movement tells us
that by late colonial times Gandhi‟s model of a village-based civilization of India stood
thoroughly defeated, as the Congress and Nehru went on to adopt a (Soviet-inspired)
industrial model for the nation. At the same time, as Ambedkar‟s critique of Gandhi
made explicit, Gandhi‟s imagination of the village as a harmonious and moral community
was a thoroughly upper-caste imagination, which could not allay dalit experiences of
caste oppression within the Indian village.
Also, Gandhi himself had a complicated relationship with the Indian peasant. While he
invoked and identified with the peasant ideologically, he was uncomfortable with the
radical and militant turn that peasant struggles often took, something which his
contemporary socialists and communists strongly criticized him for. Almost always,
Gandhi insisted on purely anti-colonial actions, such as no-revenue campaigns, but shied
away from no-rent and anti-landlord action – that is, from class struggle internal to the
nation. Gandhi famously called off the non-cooperation movement precisely because
peasants in Chauri Chaura had turned violent against the local police. And this was not
the only occasion when Gandhi decided to apply „brakes‟ upon peasant movements, as
Marxist historians used to say often. Not surprisingly, if Gandhi can be seen as a peasant
leader at all, he was a leader of relatively affluent peasants, such as the Gujarat
Patidars, often at the cost of lower sections of the peasantry, such as the Dharalas who
were routinely exploited by the Patidars of the region. In any case, as historians have
shown, Gandhi‟s entry into Indian politics in 1919 through the Kheda and the
15

Champaran satyagrahas was an entry into a peasant domain, which was already
mobilized and active much before Gandhi came to the scene. (Sarkar 1983)
While it is true that many peasant struggles invoked Gandhi‟s name, different peasant
communities from different parts of the nation interpreted Gandhi‟s message in their
own, independent ways, often in contradiction to Gandhian ideals themselves. Thus, in
Bihar and UP peasants saw Gandhi as a saint, believed in his healing and occult powers
and his capability to punish those who defied his call. In Bengal, adivasis believed that
wearing a Gandhi cap or chanting Gandhi‟s name made them immune to police bullets.
In the Gudem Hills of Andhra, Alluri Sita Rama Raju preached Gandhi‟s message of
temperance and khadi but led a guerilla war in the local fituri tradition. In other words,
while Gandhi‟s name was intrinsic to peasant struggles, especially in the 1920s, peasants
acted on their own initiative and in their own ways, very often to the utter
disappointment of Gandhi himself. (Amin 1995)
Figure 10.2.3: A statue of Alluri Sita Rama Raju in contemporary Andhra

Source: www.panoramio.com/photo/21708222
In other words, while it might appear that the Gandhian critique of industrial modernity
and conventional bourgeois forms of politics automatically translated into a peasant
political ideology, that was most certainly not the case. Just as urban, middle class
politics found itself in mismatch with peasant struggles in India, Gandhian politics too
remained somewhat in mismatch with peasant movements.
16

Socialists, communists and the peasant
While peasant movements gave the Indian national movement its militancy and mass
nature, peasant movements were by no means synonymous with nationalism, Gandhian
or otherwise. It was through a critique of mainstream nationalism that socialists and
communists got involved with peasant movements in India, especially after the much-
lamented interruption of the non-cooperation movement by the Gandhian leadership.
Socialists and communists became active in India first and foremost through urban
working class movements, because in Marxism it was the proletariat which was the
political priority. However, peasant militancy compelled them to reinterpret conventional
Marxism and take on the question of the peasantry.
The Kisan Sabha movement started in 1929 in Bihar and by 1935 had spread to UP,
Andhra, Kerala, Bengal, Orissa etc, mainly under socialist/communist influence. Its
demands were radical, such as abolition of the zamindari system, occupancy rights to all
tenants, reduction of interests and debts etc, though the ultimate revolutionary demand
for „land to the tiller‟ would come some years later. Some members of the Indian
National Congress itself went on to form a Congress Socialist Party in 1934. In fact, it
was because of the CSP members, who simultaneously participated in Congress and in
Kisan Sabha activities, that Kisan Sabhas remained aligned to Congress nationalism, at
least for a while. It was in response to these developments within and outside the
Congress that the Congress finally adopted an Agrarian Programme as late as in 1936,
even though it had adopted an industrialization and planning policy years earlier. Even
so, once the Congress came to power in the provincial ministries in 1937, its relationship
with Kisan Sabha movements became fraught. In 1937 the Kisan Sabha adopted the red
flag, in 1938 it denounced the Gandhian policy of class collaboration, adopted agrarian
revolution as its ultimate goal, criticized the Congress and Gandhi‟s hesitation in
participating in peasant struggles in the princely states – all this leading the Congress to
announce in 1938 that Congressmen could no longer become members of the Kisan
Sabhas. The 1940s saw powerful peasant struggles all over India and especially after the
1942 famine, communist ideas became critical to Indian peasant politics. 1946 saw the
Tebhaga movement for sharecroppers‟ rights in Bengal and the legendary Telengana
movement against feudal oppression in the Hyderabad princely state, both in the name
of communism and revolution. In other words, communist and socialist ideas deeply
complicated the relationship between peasant action and the mainstream nationalist
movement in India.
17

Figure 10.2.4: Swami Sahajanand Saraswati, founder of the Bihar Provincial Kisan Sabha
(1929) and the first president of the All India Kisan Sabha (1936)
Source: http://www.indianetzone.com/photos_gallery/21/Swami-Sahajand-_3877.jpg
Figure 10.2.5: Sunil Janah, photograph, Bengal Famine, 1943

Source:http://beta.thehindu.com/multimedia/archive/00011/06dfr_Bengal_1943_jp_111
52a.jpg
18

Figure 10.2.6: Zainul Abedin, sketch, Bengal famine of 1943

Source: http://www.samarthbharat.com/zainulabedin.jpg
Figure 10.2.7: E. M. S. Namboodiripad and P. Sundarayya at All India Kisan Sabha

Conference, Bhakna, Punjab, 1943
Source: http://www.thehindu.com/fline/fl1507/15070101.jpg
19

Figure 10.2.8: Ila Mitra, a communist, who worked in the Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti in
1942, and then in the Tebhaga sharecroppers movment in 1946
Source: http://www.mukto-mona.com/personalities/ila_mitra/ila_mitra.jpg
Figure 10.2.9: Sunil Janah, photograph, peasant march in Punjab

Source:http://suniljanah.org/sjanah/exsf00/panpic/pnl02ind01-dtl-peasantmarch.jpg
20

Figure 10.2.10: Chittaprasad‟s wood-cut on the Tebhaga peasant struggle

Source: www.artofbengal.com
However, communists and socialists did not have an easy relationship with Indian
peasant struggles either. In UP and Bihar, socialism – which included many shades of
political opinion from Gandhian socialism to „scientific Marxism‟ – ended up aligning with
the upper peasantry and the middle castes, leaving out the cause of the dalits and
landless labour. In Bengal and Maharashtra, communists were torn between the
conventional wisdom about industrial workers being the „advanced‟ revolutionary class
and the imperative of peasant mobilization. In western and southern India, the
communists had to deal with peasant struggles that were as much caste as class
movements. Even more ironically, during the second World War, communists decided to
support the British in their war against Nazi Germany and withdrew from all agitation,
because that was the Soviet demand from communist parties worldwide. The Congress,
however, argued that this was the moment for the Quit India movement, because
England was weakened by its international war-effort and could be now pressurized to
concede to Indian demands. Peasant struggles peaked in response to the Congress call,
and the communists were faced with the uncomfortable fact that the call of nationalism –
rather than of global workers‟ solidarity – inspired peasant radicalism in a way they had
not quite expected. In other words, even the communists, despite their far more
sympathetic understanding of the peasant question, could not quite resolve the difficult
relationships between the peasant and the proletariat (and hence the post-1947 rise of
Maoism in India) and between nationalism and internationalism.
Writing the peasant

21

The above account – of the mismatch between the history of peasant movements and
the history of political ideologies such as nationalism, Gandhism, socialism, communism
etc – tells us that the peasant has always been an intractable figure in the domain of
modern politics. And that this is because modernity itself has been historically defined in
opposition to the so-called „pre-modern‟ figure of the peasant. Indian historiography,
1980s onwards, has begun to recognize this and has tried to rethink and rewrite the
story of the peasant vis á vis the nation. In the rest of this lesson, we shall discuss the
nature of this rethinking.
Both nationalist and Marxist historiographies encountered the peasantry as an

inexplicable, changing and differentiated group in itself – defying any single category,
classification or stereotype. Peasant movements themselves were vastly different in
different places and different times – creating an impression of unmanageable
complexity and unpredictability.

Varieties of peasant movements
It is impossible to offer a comprehensive list of the many forms of peasant action
in 20th century India. Mappila rebellions in Kerala were very different from East
Bengali Muslim peasant politics, even though both were seen as Islamic. North
Indian middle-caste peasant politics, vis á vis the zamindar and talukdar, was
very different from dalit and Muslim struggles, in Kerala, vis á vis upper-castes
and Syrian Christians. The north-east and Bastar and Jharkhand were very
different agrarian contexts, even if they were all clubbed together as „tribal‟, as
were peasant and pastoral politics in the north-west frontier area. Rural-urban
relationships too were very different in Bihar and Punjab and Kerala – producing
very different peasant figures and politics. Congressmen and communists,
bhagats, swamis and babas, fakirs and ulamas, kings and prophets, missionaries
and the RSS were various ideological influences in various places. Symbolisms
and gods, languages and idioms, rituals and practices of dissent, institutional
configurations of leadership, popular justice and redistribution varied from place
to place and time to time. Peasant notions of utopia, whether it be Ramrajya,
Gandhi-raj, swaraj or even revolution, also changed greatly though time. The
nature of internal stratification within the peasantry, in terms of both class and
caste, also differed across regions. Plantation contexts differed from zamindari
contexts, which in turn differed from forest areas and jotedar dominated areas.
And so on ad infinitum.
Historians consequently have tried to make sense of this diversity by raising

different kinds of questions. Is peasant politics class politics or a complex
articulation of class, caste, kinship, religion and community? What are the
standard peasant organizational forms and communication channels, in the
absence of literacy and associational forms such as trade unions or political
parties? Is peasant rebellion necessarily spontaneous and sporadic or pre-planned
and organized? Is peasant society structurally violent or passive? Are peasants
generally mobilized through outside/urban influence or do they possess innate
mobilizational traditions? Is an alliance ever possible between working-class and
22

peasant movements, i.e. can one ever envisage a single, united „peoples‟
movement? Is a national or Indian peasant narrative possible, or are peasants to
be always written in local or regional terms? Is the term „peasantry‟ a good term
at all, given that it tries to hold together different and often antagonistic groups,
such as upper-caste, affluent peasantry, petty landlords and moneylenders,
middle-caste peasants, sharecroppers, tenants, landless labourers, non-
agricultural rural castes, plantation labour, jhum cultivators and so on?
Source: Various
By the 1970s, at the height of disillusionment with Stalinist Russia and of peasant
movements all over the ex-colonial world, including in revolutionary China, a rethinking
set in amongst Marxist historians about the peasantry. Very influential, amongst others,
was James Scott‟s book Weapons of the Weak, where Scott argued that peasants,
precisely because of their distance from literate, urban, globalized contexts, were far
more immune to the influence of dominant ideologies of state and capital. Therefore,
they were not fully hegemonized and were potentially more radical and resistant in their
politics than urban working classes. Even when they were not engaged in open rebellion,
poor peasants were not passive. They were perpetually engaged in everyday forms of
struggle against authority, through routine acts of shirking, lying, escaping, pilfering and
so on. (Scott, 1985) In the Indian context, Ranajit Guha made somewhat the same
argument, about the un-hegemonized nature of the peasantry. Guha, however,
emphasized moments of open rebellion or insurgency. In this framework, nationalism
was reformulated as itself a relationship of dominance and subordination, in which
middle and upper classes sought to hegemonize the peasantry, while the peasants
repeatedly asserted their own autonomous terms about participation in and
transformation of political movements. The task of the historian was to be able to read
these autonomous terms and imaginaries of the peasant, otherwise hidden from view of
elite historiography. Guha argued that methodologically this was possible by dwelling on
moments of peasant insurgency, because these were the moments when the elite were
forced to „recognize‟ the subaltern and therefore record their presence in documents and
archives. Rebellions thus made the peasant visible and readable to the historian. (Guha
1983)
Guha went on to analyse, through a study of peasant rebellions, what he called the
elementary aspects of peasant consciousness, which made peasants into political rather
than backward and pre-political beings. Without going into the details of his analysis, we
may say that the singular characteristic of peasant consciousness that Guha identified
was the sensibility of community – in contrast to bourgeois political consciousness based
on „rational‟ notions of individual rights and interests. Communities might be constituted
in changing and flexible ways – by different elements at different moments, such as
caste or faith or territoriality or even a negation/inversion of elite-subaltern relationships
– but the point was that the primary form of political being of the peasantry was that of
community. Partha Chatterjee went on to further complicate this concept of community,
as itself an internally differentiated unity because of caste, class and gender
stratifications within the peasantry itself. The specific nature of peasant political
community, then, would have to be understood not only in terms of elite-subaltern
relationships but also in terms of relations between sections of the peasantry. Chatterjee
even suggests that jati might very well be the critical form of peasant solidarity, because
23

the term jati, in most Indian languages, simultaneously functioned in the multiple
registers of caste, caste-cluster, tribe, religious sect, nationality and even nation – not
just amongst Hindu but also amongst Muslims and Christians in India. (Chatterjee 1994,
165-66)
Later historians have moved further still. Vinayak Chaturvedi, for instance, argues that
peasant politics must not be restricted to insurgency or rebellion. For that too is a sign
that historians are unable to imagine peasants as thinking or intellectual beings,
generating political ideas and imaginings in the way that urban, bourgeois political
thinkers do. Peasants are therefore reduced to their moment of action, while elites are
given the monopoly of sustained theoretical formulations. The unintended result of this
inability to acknowledge peasant ideas and ideologies on their own terms is that
historians presume that peasants think in ways exactly the opposite of bourgeois civil
societies. Thus peasants think in community and cultural terms because the modern
bourgeois individual thinks in economic and class terms, and so on.
Chaturvedi, therefore, goes on to study the working of a public sphere and of

intellectual-political figures amongst the peasantry. He develops his argument through a
study of the Dharalas of Gujarat, who lived as „criminal tribes‟ vis á vis the colonial state
and as exploitable labour vis á vis the Patidar peasants. Chaturvedi shows how within
the Gandhian national movement and in Gandhi‟s own imagination, the Dharalas were
misfits. He also shows the existence amongst Dharalas of an imagination of political
community, ethical government and kingship, which was pre-nation and pre-national,
i.e. which was already functional in Gujarat much before the rise of mass nationalism
now famously associated only with Gandhi and his favourite followers, the Patidar
peasants. The Dharala leaders Ranchod and later Daduram were peasant intellectuals
who demonstrated that this alternative politics continued, even though transformed, well
into colonial and nationalist times, cutting across the domain of dominant national and
liberal ideals. In fact, Daduram, in the early 20 th century, engaged in public debates with
the ideas of Tilak and Gandhi, especially regarding matters of caste and peasant-hood.
(Chaturvedi 2007)
In other words, just as peasant politics continue to take the nation by surprise even
today – think of Singur and Nandigram in contemporary West Bengal – historians and
history in India continue to rethink and debate the question of peasants in modernity.
24

10.3: Tribals
A tradition of rebellion?
In modern times, of all the peoples of our country, tribes have had the longest and the
most militant tradition of political resistance. Anti-colonial and anti-landlord movements
amongst tribes began as early as the late 18th century, turning into primarily anti-
moneylender and anti-police movements in the 19th. In the 19th century, millenarian and
prophetic idioms dominated tribal rebellions, while in the early 20 th century tribal politics
became largely forest movements and developed a close but complicated relationship
with nationalism. 1930s onwards, the question of tribal autonomy within the nation
emerged in areas like Jharkhand and Nagaland. Tribal movements also continued well
after 1947, and continue till today. Since the 1970s, tribal movements have taken an
extreme left turn, especially in contexts of mining, plantation and landless peasant
labour. Hence, the centrality of tribes in the Naxalite movement of 1969-70 in Bengal,
the trade-union movements in Bihar coalfields in 1960s-70s and in the currently ongoing
Lalgarh anti-police agitations in West Bengal. Since the 1990s, environmental
movements, movements against displacement and corporate encroachment of common
property too have had tribals at the forefront.
Of course, tribal movements have changed in nature through time, as has the political
subjectivity of tribal peoples. Nevertheless, there is enough continuity in these
movements to warrant this history being named as a tribal political tradition. After all,
even today in the Santal Parganas, memories of the 1855 hul rebellion and the names of
Sidhu and Kanu continue to resonate on both festive and political occasions.

Rebellious memories
Historians have tried to reconstruct tribal memories of rebellions from their oral
traditions. Amongst the Bhils of western India is found a tradition of goth or
stories about rebellions, which are pitched as stories of „epic resistance‟. Here
insurgent Bhils appear as heroes with superhuman capabilities. Interestingly,
there appears a mismatch between the historians‟ story and the Bhil goth. While
in history texts, the 1914 Bhil dhum or the more recent 1949 one are seen as
important (both in scale and in terms of their relationship with the national
movement), in goth it is the earlier dhum of 1907 which is seen as the more
significant event. While the movements of 1914 and 1949 were about forest laws
and the colonial state, 1907 was about the larger question of Bhil sovereignty and
kingship – a matter not easily accommodated in histories that presume the nation
as the only possible framework of thought and the only possible political form for
a people.
Source: Skaria, Ajay. 1999. Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and
Wildness in Western India. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
25

For purpose of our discussion here, we shall concentrate on the first half of the 20 th
century and on the tribal engagement with Gandhian mass nationalism, though we must
always keep in mind the much longer tradition of tribal resistance in India that is
mentioned above.
Tribes and the national movement
Tribal movements in the first half of the 20th century were too numerous to be listed.
The century was inaugurated by the legendary ulgulan or rebellion of Birsa Munda in
1899-1900, which sought not only to drive out the dikus or outsider-moneylenders from
tribal localities but also to replace British Raj by Munda raj and by a new Birsaite
religion.
Figure 10.3.1: Birsa Munda being taken to Ranchi jail, newspaper clipping, 1900
Source: http://cpim.org/2007/0916/1857_1.gif
The 1910s saw agitations amongst the Maria, Muria and the Gonds of Bastar; the rise of
spiritual reform movements such as Tana Bhagats amongst Oraons of Chhotanagpur;
Singrai‟s movement amongst the Hos of Singbhum; Daduram‟s movement amongst the
Dharalas of Kheda, Gujrat and so on. 1920 onwards there was a general state of unrest
amongst tribals all over India, in tandem with the increasing mass nature of the
nationalist movement, which peaked in the 1940s.
There was a clear anti-colonial thrust to all these tribal movements, even prior to the
rise of Gandhian mass nationalism. These movements saw the colonial state as „foreign‟
and exploitative. But unlike mainstream nationalism, these movements also saw
exploitative Indians – especially merchants and moneylenders – as „outsiders‟. 1920s
onwards, tribes became increasingly familiar with the names of Gandhi and the
Congress, even though neither had any well-thought out position about tribes in India, in
the way that they had about caste or the peasantry. But even as they developed a
relationship with mainstream nationalism, tribes retained active memories of their 19 th-
century traditions of revolt. They recast nationalism itself through their own forms and
26

own vocabularies of insurgent political action – e.g. fituri amongst Marias, Murias and
Gonds of Bastar; tribute-collection raids amongst the Bhils of Central India and dhandak
amongst hill-tribes of U.P. These tribal forms of political action, with their specific local
names, however, appeared as wild and incomprehensible forms of war in Gandhian
terms.
The pressures of mass mobilization of course required that the Congress engage with
ongoing tribal movements in different parts of the country. In the 1920s, the issue
around which tribal movements and the Gandhian movement could come together was
the issue of colonial forest policy. Since the late 19 th century, colonial forest policy – in
the name of forest conservation and commercial exploitation of forest resources – had
affected the customary rights of tribals to forest land and forest produce and to
alternative livelihoods such as hunting or slash-and-burn cultivation. Tribals were now
punished and fined for what had been their traditional relationship with and uses of
forests. They were also forcibly turned, by this forest policy, into either taxable settled
cultivators or servile coolie labour for colonial forest departments and plantations. Tribals
in many parts of India, therefore, repeatedly rebelled against forest officials, destroyed
documents, fought against timber merchants and even set fire to forests. All these
episodes of resistance, especially by the late 1920s and 30s, would come together with
Gandhian nationalism and its ideology of civil disobedience of colonial laws, including
forest laws. But as the Congress debates in 1930s in the Central Provinces show, the
Congress imagination of both forest conservation and of violent, dangerous tribes was
not so different from that of the colonizers. The Congress therefore very hesitantly
agreed to join the Gonds and the Baigas in forest satyagraha, and stopped far short of
the distance that the tribals were ready to go. (Prasad 2006)
During Non-Cooperation times, in the hills of Kumaun and Garhwal, Badridutt Pande led
hill-tribes in a militant movement against forest laws and forced labour, demanding
Swatantra Bharat much before the Congress did. As is well known, in the long run, this
region would become the centre of environmental movements in India. (Guha 1991) In
Midnapur, Santals and nationalist leaders such as Sailajnandan Sen came together in a
struggle against forest laws and the British-owned Midnapur Zamindari Company. The
tribal areas of Midnapur would soon become the hotbed of political militancy, as would
be evident in 1942, in 1969-70 and then again in 2008-09. In the Gudem Hills, Alluri
Sitarama Raju reinvented the tribal fituri revolts by spreading the Gandhian message of
temperance and khadi, all the while engaging in guerilla warfare, till he was executed in
1924. In all these cases, tribal militancy went far beyond the mainstream nationalist
agenda, leaving the Congress and Gandhi himself uncomfortable with the tribal as a
political subject. (Arnold 1986)
In fact, in tribal areas, the communist party would often become more influential than
the Congress, even in nationalist times. The most powerful example of this was the
Telengana movement of 1946, a radical anti-landlord movement by poor tribal peasants
in the state of Hyderabad, which had to be suppressed later by the independent Indian
state. Tribal movements in Tripura and Dahanu under communist influence and the Varli
struggle in Thane, Maharashtra, under socialist-led Kisan Sabha were other examples of
movements that were nominally part of the nationalist movement but went beyond
nationalist demands and towards a communist imagination of the future. It is not
27

accidental that even today, in tribal areas Maoism remains influential. After all,
mainstream nationalism had failed to address the tribal question in India.
Even within communist movements, however, there emerged a mismatch between

mobilizing tribes in class terms, through demands of minimum wages, land and common
property rights, and mobilizing tribes in terms of an adivasi cultural identity. In
Chhotanagpur, for example, tribal activists split around the 1930s – some of them
joining Kisan Sabha and communist groups, which highlighted issues of class struggle,
and others joining the Adivasi Mahasabha, which highlighted the autonomous cultural
identity of tribes. Post-1947 too, the Jharkhand Party repeatedly split on similar
questions.
The colonial construction of „tribes‟
To understand the difficult relationship between tribes and the nation, therefore, we
must really raise the question of what it is to be a tribal in India. Until now we have used
the term „tribe‟ unproblematically in our discussion. We must now pause and ponder
over the history of the term „tribe‟ itself.
Today, it is commonsensical to say that Santals or Nagas or Hos or Mundas are „tribals‟ –
as if it is self-evident what the meaning of term tribe is. We must remember, however,
that the word tribe has had a very complex political history. Perhaps even as late as
early 19th century, the word tribe merely meant a community which self-consciously
traced its origins to a common ancestry – so that in the English language, tribe, nation
and race were used interchangeably to simply imply a „people‟. Thus one could say, for
instance, the „tribe of Englishmen‟ without it being a misnomer. It was with the rise of
modern-day slave and indentured labour economies and of racial and evolutionary
theories – both in the 19th century – that the word tribe came to acquire the derogatory
connotation of being (racially) primitive. In other words, the modern usage of the word
tribe was the invention of colonial capitalism. The very idea of the „modern‟ and of
„modernity‟ was founded on its opposition to this idea of the „primitive‟ – as embodied in
„tribes‟ and „aborigines‟ of the colonial world. The „science‟ that studied „primitives‟,
„discovered‟ by the West, came to be known as ethnology or anthropology.
The colonial state in India was an „ethnographic state‟. From the late 18th century, it had
begun setting up artificial boundaries or frontiers around what it saw as untamed and
wild interiors, to keep „primitives‟ confined and to prevent direct intermixing between
peoples classified as tribes and those as agrarian castes. In the long run, these areas
became areas of exception – excluded or non-regulation areas – outside the general
administration of mainland British India. (Banerjee 2006) From mid-19th century, the
colonial state had also begun to mark out and physically harness certain peoples as
racially suited to labour as coolies or indentured workers in plantations and mines. These
communities too were defined as primitives. (Ghosh 1999) Based on these processes of
material reconstitution and isolation of some peoples as „primitives‟, the colonial state,
late-19th century onwards, embarked upon elaborate census and ethnological surveys, in
order to classify and administer the Indian population in terms of ethnologized categories
of caste and tribe. (Dirks 2001)
28

But despite the institution of both classificatory and physical boundaries, it remained
impossible to distinguish once and for all between tribes and castes. Contiguous groups
with different names could share social practices and groups with the same name could
have different histories in different localities. This made it impossible to distinguish
castes and tribes by name or by fixed and permanent criteria. Through the early 20 th
century, colonial officials continued to produce drastically different lists in different years,
naming some people as tribes, only to exclude them in the next list and then revising the
revisions again. These lists used a variety of labels – aboriginal tribe; aboriginal, forest
and gypsy tribe; backward tribe; primitive tribe; forest tribe; hill and forest tribe;
indigenous tribe; Hindu primitive tribe and so on – revealing the fundamental
arbitrariness of the whole exercise. In 1936, the colonial state machinery produced a list
of what it saw as „backward tribes‟, which after independence became the list of
„scheduled tribes‟ for the purposes of protective legislation and reservation. It remained
unresolved, however, why and on what grounds, for the purpose of reservations, there
needed to be a continued distinction between schedules of castes and tribes in the first
place.

The „tribes‟ of Chhotanagpur?
The story of the Chhotanagpur communities show up the deeply arbitrary nature
of the definition of „tribes‟. Bauri, Ghasi, Bhogta, Rjwar and Tili, Scheduled Castes
today, were declared „indigenous tribes‟ in the 1931 census. Kamar and Koli,
„backward tribes‟ in the 1936 list, were dropped from the list entirely later.
Amongst groups with long-standing social relations with Scheduled Tribe groups
of the area, Lohars and Goraits were declared STs but not the Gareris. Mahatos,
the largest community in this area and presently a middle-caste, also called
themselves Kurmi, Koiri, Gwala and Ahir. Dalton in 1872 called them Aryans,
Risley a few years later called them tribes, local traditions called Kurmi Mahatos
and Santals „half-brothers‟ and till the 1930s, courts debated whether Mahato
inheritance cases should be judged by the Hindu code or by tribal customs. The
All India Kurmi Kshatriya Mahasabha, set up in 1894 in Bihar, searched out
brotherly castes in Gujrat and Andhra but refused to admit the Kurmi Mahatos of
Chhotanagpur till 1924. Congress social reformers began a „kshatriyanization‟
programme amongst Kurmi Mahatos at this time to bring them into the Hindu
fold. But simultaneously, the Gossaiyan movement amongst them sought to
prevent their assimilation into the mainstream culture. Again, the Momins of this
area, despite sharing in many so-called tribal features or customs, were never
considered as part of the tribes list, because they were seen as Muslims.
Source: Sengupta, Nirmal. 1988. Reappraising Tribal Movements II:
Legitimisation and Spread. Economic & Political Weekly. 23(20). May 14,
1003-1005.
29

Middle classes and „tribes‟
In other words, who was a tribe was really a matter of arbitrary governmental decisions,
based on an imputation of primitiveness to some groups and not to others. While the
attribute of primitiveness to peoples like Santals or Nagas was a colonial one, it
enmeshed in complicated ways with traditional Brahmanical stereotypes and casteist or
even racial terms such as jungli, kaliparaj etc, making the label „tribe‟ doubly derogatory
in India – bringing together imputations of primitiveness as well as untouchability.
The English-educated, middle-class nationalists – most of whom were upper caste –

internalized the vocabulary of colonialism and also labeled peoples like Santals and
Nagas as „primitive‟ in order to bolster their own claims to modernity. At the same time,
the elite classes saw in tribes „immoral‟ or „wild‟ traits – such as excessive drinking,
dancing, feasting on the one hand, and the lack of modern economic rationality on the
other. The commercial peasant and moneylending castes too saw in tribes and in tribal
land an eminently exploitable source of labour, timber and mineral resources – for which
an expanded, indeed global, market had developed in the colonial period. A structural
antagonism thus developed between modern, „mainstream‟ India – represented by the
self-consciously modern middle classes, professionals and traders – and „tribal‟ India.
This explains why tribes became hostile to dikus, i.e. to caste Hindu traders,
governmental officials and moneylenders, and why the Congress would often be seen as
a diku party, as in Jharkhand in the 1930s.
Ambedkar
Modernist discourses were so powerful that it was not just upper-caste nationalists who
derogated tribes as primitive and wild. Even a radical dalit leader such as Ambedkar
found it necessary to maintain a fundamental distinction between dalits and tribals.
While Ambedkar ensured that Scheduled Tribes, like Scheduled Castes, would have a
right to reservation in the Constitution of independent India, he too saw tribes as
primitive in a way that lower castes were not. Ambedkar argued that “[t]he Aboriginal
Tribes have not yet developed any political sense” and that they could thus “disturb the
[communal] balance” between minority and majority constituencies “without doing any
good to themselves.” (Middleton 2010) In other words, in his arguments about
democracy and representation, unlike the dalits, the tribes seemed inadmissible as a
political subject or a constituency. Clearly, if the relationship between the dalit and the
nation was fraught, the relationship between the tribe and the nation was an impossible
one, and structurally so. This was because the very claim of modernity of the nation,
including Ambedkar‟s own imagination of the nation, rested on a fundamental
counterpoise with the non-modern – and the tribe was meant to be precisely the
embodiment of all that was non- and anti-modern in history. Therefore, Ambedkar‟s dalit
movement and his critique of casteism and Hinduism could not offer a space to tribes.
30


Aesthetics and „tribals‟
While most middle-class nationalists saw tribes as „primitive‟, there were
some poets and artists who saw in the tribe the image of a culturally
authentic and politically radical identity. Rabindranath Tagore‟s poems „Kopai‟
and the „Santali girl‟, Nandalal Basu‟s painting of Santal women and of Santali
dance, Ramkinkar Baij‟s famous 1939 sculpture the „Santal Family‟
demonstrate the Shantiniketan school‟s aesthetic preoccupation with the
adivasi. Indeed, a historian even names this as the „Santalism‟ of Bengali
artistic modernism of the 1930s and 40s. Later leftist/progressive writers and
painters too used the image of the adivasi profusely. Even filmmakers, such
as Mrinal Sen („Mrigaya‟), Satyajit Ray („Agantuk‟, „Aranyer Din Ratri‟),
Gautam Ghosh („Abar Aranye‟) etc used adivasi images and motifs as political
markers of an alternative imagination of freedom from the modern-day
alienated, repressed life of the nation. Here music, the camera and adivasi
dance were used to set forth the middle-class dystopia.
Source: Rycroft, Daniel. 2006. Santalism: Reconfiguring the Santal in
Indian Art and Politics. Indian Historical Review. 33(1) January, 150-
174.
31

Figure 10.3.2: Ramkinkar Baij‟s sculpture the „Santal Family‟, 1939

Source: http://www.frieze.com/images/shows/baij.jpg
Here are two clips from Satyajit Ray‟s Aranyer Din Ratri
(http://youtube.com/watch?v=UowJzD4L8gI) and Agantuk
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go96hCB3BCQ).
Gandhi
Gandhi, on his part, sought to mobilize tribes through messages of social improvement
such as temperance, vegetarianism and non-violence. This moral position presumed and
reinforced the common prejudice that tribes were inherently wild, drunken and violent.
Politically, it turned a blind eye to the specificities of tribal life. Tribes, for instance, had a
tradition of home-brewing of liquor from rice and mahua flowers. Collective drinking was
32

part of their festivities. The colonial state undercut this tradition, because it saw profit in
encouraging a revenue-generating trade in spirits by caste-Hindu merchants. Needless
to say, the spirits sold in the market did not have the nutritional value of home-brewed
liquor, making drinking now into a very different act from the traditional drinking
practices of tribal peoples. Again, for poor tribals, vegetarianism of the Gandhian variety
was a far more expensive and unaffordable option than hunting for small game in
forests. Also, the tradition of violent rebellion amongst tribals was misread by Gandhian
nationalism as signs of the wild, irrational, dangerous, even „criminal‟ traits of primitives,
in a way quite similar to the reading by colonial officials.
Interestingly, there were some tribal movements in early 20 th century which did embrace
the ideals of temperance and vegetarianism. The Tana Bhagats amongst the Oraons of
Chhotanagpur, for instance, had already embraced such „reform‟ ideals before the
coming of Gandhi in 1914-15. Other communities, such as tribes in the Gudem hills of
Andhra, embraced such ideals later under Gandhi‟s influence. Yet the form of their
political action – such as the no-rent agitation amongst Tana Bhagats or guerilla warfare
amongst the Gonds – did not fit the Gandhian mode of political agitation and had to be
disowned by nationalism, despite the claims of tribals that they were indeed following
Gandhi.
The question of religion
Gandhian or proto-Gandhian ideals of temperance and vegetarianism amongst tribes

were seized upon by Hindu revivalist forces, in order to prove that tribes were actually
not distinct communities but only backward Hindus. Many Congressmen and nationalist
anthropologists believed this too. Nationalists argued that the colonial state counted
tribals as non-Hindus or „animists‟ in order to divide-and-rule and in order to preserve
sections of the Indian population as anthropological specimens in non-regulation or
excluded areas. Of course, the economic question of the right of the elite to buy and sell
land in tribal areas was central here – a question that has come back to haunt us today,
leading us to debate a Tribal Land Rights Bill as late as in the 21 st century. Nationalist
opinion thus shared a basic premise with communal, Hindu forces – which sought to
reconvert tribes to Hinduism through shuddhi ceremonies and to increase the number of
Hindus in the census – by counting in tribes – so as to reinforce Hindu majoritarianism.
Thus, the question of tribal religion had a huge political relevance to nationalism. This
was further complicated by the fact that missionaries had been active in tribal areas, and
many tribes had become converted Christians. (Bara 2010; Pati 2001) In areas as
different as Chhotanagpur and the north-east, conversion became for tribes a way of
defying mainstream caste society and feudal systems of forced labour, though it must
not be forgotten that missionaries often also worked hand in hand with the colonial
state, for instance in supplying tribal labour from Jharkhand to Assam tea plantations. At
the same time, missionary schools, improvement associations, even cooperative banking
societies – such as in Jharkhand and Chattisgarh – became a way of educational and
professional mobility amongst tribal peoples. In fact, formal political organizations
amongst tribes initially emerged from amongst these educated Christian converts.
33

Conversion, however, also led to a social cleavage between Christian and non-Christian
communities within the same tribe, often with grave political implications. Missionary
activities also inspired counter-evangelism amongst Hindu revivalist groups – whose
political agenda was to „reconvert‟ Christian adivasis back into Hinduism, an activity that
still continues, often with violent results, in today‟s communal context. In the 1930s and
40s too, elements from the Congress and Hindu Mahasabha worked at „reconversion‟,
especially during census times, and raised inflammatory slogans around questions such
as whether tribal languages should be written in Roman or Devnagri scripts.
Adivasi as a category
Needless to say, given this political context, charged with contending rhetorics of the
colonial state, Gandhian nationalism, missionary propaganda and Hindu revivalist effort,
many tribals became uncomfortable with the very label of „tribe‟. For this label itself
implied that tribes were primitive, wild, immoral, infantile and even pre-political. That is,
they could become part of the nation only through conversion, re-conversion, reform and
education by the modern, non-tribal political classes. It was in defiance of this
demeaning modernist and modernizing rhetoric that many tribal communities chose the
label adivasi for themselves.
The term adivasi began to be used first in the 1930s in Jharkhand. The 1930s saw the
emergence of a demand for a separate adivasi state, on the ground that adivasis were
the adi or oldest indigenous peoples in this area and therefore had the first right to
land here and a corresponding right to govern themselves according to indigenous
customs and culture. This demand was presented to the Simon Commission and later to
the Cripps Mission. In 1936 various organizations in this area, including the
Chhotanagpur Unnati Samaj, merged to form the Adivasi Mahasabha, ancestor to the
Jharkhand Party, which launched a struggle against diku raj and rivaled the Congress
electorally because the Congress was seen as a party of outsiders and non-tribals.
Clearly the term adivasi implied a nationalist claim, different from that of mainstream
Indian nationalism, of the prior right of indigenous peoples to certain regions within the
nation. However, this was not a claim without complications. For one, this was the time
when the prefix „adi-‟ was being claimed by non-tribal groups too, on the basis of similar
assertions of first right to the nation‟s land. Thus in the south, dalits began calling
themselves Adi Dravidas to contest upper-caste as well as Congress hegemony. For the
other, as we have already seen above, the question of who could be counted as tribal or
adivasi was not yet a settled question, because lists of tribes kept changing through
time. The most tragic example of this was the career of the Adivasi Mahasabha leader
Jaipal Singh, who had claimed once that 90 percent of Jharkhand‟s population was
adivasi and that he, therefore, represented the majority of Jharkhandis as an adivasi
leader. Yet the list of tribes in the following years re-scheduled many communities,
earlier known as tribes, now as non-tribals – depriving the adivasi leader of large chunks
of his constituency and in fact leading to his later electoral defeat!
Again, in the north-east of the country, for tribes such as the Nagas the term adivasi had
a different connotation – because adivasis here represented migrant tribal labour from
34

mainland India, especially Jharkhand, who had once been brought to work in plantations
but later settled here as „outsiders‟. The Nagas therefore did not own up to the term
adivasi for themselves and continued to call themselves tribes. However, the Naga claim
to autonomy in the north-east also rested, at least initially, on analogous claims to prior
right to land and freedom in the region. The Naga Club, like the Adivasi Mahasabha, also
petitioned the Simon Commission on the ground that they had been an „unconquered‟
people and should not be included in the national administrative scheme of India and
should be allowed government by a hill council according to Naga customs and culture.
By the 1940s, however, the Naga national question had become far more radical than
that of Jharkhand. By the late 1940s the demand was of a separate Naga nation, and on
14th August 1947, the Naga National Council (NNC) had declared independence for
Nagaland. The claim was of course rejected by the Indian national state. As we know,
since the north-east was geographically and ecologically more a part of south-east Asia
than of the Indo-Gangetic formation, the region had been developed as a strategic
frontier zone by the colonial state, leading to a distinct politics of confrontation and
military intervention in this area. (Yhome 2007) This was the particular history that
would inflect the „tribal question‟ in the north-east for the next century, and literally
make it a war zone in independent India.
Value addition: important terms

Indigenous people
While the term adivasi can be literally translated as indigenous people, the
English term „indigenous people‟ has acquired a subtly different political
connotation, especially since the 1980s. The ILO convention of 1989 and the
Working Group on Indigenous Population set up by the Human Rights
Commission of the UN reinvented the term „indigenous people‟ to mean
communities – such as the Maoris of Australia or Amerindians in the US – who
originally inhabited a land prior to conquest and displacement by Western
colonizers. In light of this new international vocabulary of rights of the indigene,
some activists argue today that adivasis of India are also indigenes in the same
sense of being colonized and displaced by forces of internal colonialism, namely
by mainland commercial and capitalist elements, who exploit and drain mineral,
timber and human resources from the forest and hill interiors of India. While
these activists see the relationship between adivasis and elite Indians as a
relationship of colonized and colonizer, the Indian state does not recognize
adivasis as indigenes in these terms, on the argument that unlike in Australia,
New Zealand or the Americas, in India there was no foreign conquest and
settlement analogous to „white‟ colonization.
Source: Xaxa, Virginius. 1999. Tribes as Indigenous People of India.
Economic & Political Weekly. 34(51) Dec 18-24, 3589-95.
The postcolonial
After independence, in the Constituent Assembly debates, the tribal question was recast
as a question of development rather than as a question of tribal autonomy and identity.
This despite the fact that there were voices in the Assembly such as that of Jaipal Singh
who repeatedly asserted that adivasis in India had acquired by this time a distinct
identity and a distinct political claim, different from that of non-tribals. The dominant
opinion, at the time of independence and partition, was however nationalist and
35

„integrationist‟. This opinion held that any recognition of distinct community identities
would lead to a disintegration of the nation. It also believed that once industrial and
educational development reached tribal areas, tribes would become like any other
„Indian‟, namely, a national citizen.
That of course has not happened. Adivasis today continue to be the most marginalized
and exploited sections of our population – objects of both corporate and internal
colonialism in Jharkhand, Chattisgarh and the north-east. The question of tribal
autonomy, especially in the north-east, still remains a burning question. And yet, there
is also no denying that adivasis have effectively become, within the Indian polity, the
representatives of an alternative political perspective and a counter-culture. For it is
from the perspective of adivasi history that we today formulate our critique of discourses
of growth, corporatization and development.
10.4: Labour
The „working class‟ as a category
In this lesson, we shall discuss the relationship between workers‟ movements and the
national movement. However, in order to do so, we must first discuss the rather
politically-charged category of the „working class‟.
It is commonly believed that with modernity, societies tend to industrialize. England is

quoted as the classic historical example of this modernizing process. This is because
England from the 18th century onwards, saw the systematic eviction of peasants from
land and their transformation into factory labour, leading eventually to what is called the
Industrial Revolution. This „de-peasantization‟ and „freeing‟ of labour is seen as a
necessary condition of the rise of capitalist modernity the world over. The term „freeing‟
of labour, in this context, is critical. Free labour implies that workers, once they lose
their traditional rural connections, also lose all access to means of production, including
to land and artisanal tools. The only thing they have left is pure, abstract labour power,
their own bodies and nothing else, so to speak. Workers now can no longer produce for
themselves because they have no property of their own any more. Therefore, they must
necessarily go to the market to sell their labour power for wages. Their labour is thus
like any commodity freely circulating in the market. At the same time, since workers now
are free from traditional relationships and communities, they are also free to sell their
labour to whoever they wish – for instance, to the employer who offers them the best
terms of employment – instead of necessarily having to work for a traditional master or
a feudal aristocrat or an upper-caste landlord.
It was this imagination of the „free‟ working class, based on the English model, that
produced modern political imaginations of equality and liberty. As Marx famously
remarked, precisely because it was „free‟ from encumbrances of property-ownership and
from traditional community and provincialism – because it had nothing to lose but its
chains – the proletariat was the most revolutionary class of all. It had no stakes in the
present system and therefore acted purely as a force of change. It is against the
background of this late 19th century socialist/communist imagination of the working class
that we must discuss the question of Indian working-class movements.
36

Working classes in the colony
With colonialism India saw the decline of traditional industries and artisans, i.e. a
process of de-industrialization rather than industrialization. But colonial India, because of
its global market connections, also saw the rise, however circumscribed, of new
industries such as jute, cotton, iron and steel, railways, mining, plantations etc. There
did emerge, in this context, a new industrial working class in India by the late 19 th
century. But there is no denying the fact that the working classes were far outnumbered
in India by peasants, as they are even today. And there is no denying the fact that
labour here was not „free‟ in the English sense, because it retained traditional rural,
community and caste connections even when it migrated to cities and factories. Also, as
many historians have shown, industrial labour continued to be „bonded‟ rather than „free‟
in India, because the colonial state itself used various coercive measures, such as the
infamous indenture system, so as to ensure cheap and plentiful labour for its colonial
commercial products.
Political activists and historians, therefore, worried for a long time that the Indian
working class was still short of becoming the modern working class of the English or
American variety. It did not seem to always act according to a so-called progressive
working-class consciousness. While it did participate in trade unionism, strike action and
other classic proletarian forms of politics, the Indian working class also participated in
communal riots, caste mobilizations, neighbourhood rivalries etc, which tended to divide
rather than unite the working class as a revolutionary political force. At the same time, it
was seen as a huge problem that the majority of Indian workers were not employed in
the „formal‟ or organized sector. Most workers were informally employed as casual or
domestic or seasonal or even self-employed labour, which meant that they were not
easily amenable to trade unions or other organized forms of politics. This apparently
non-modern nature of the working class was seen as a great constraint to modern
emancipatory politics in India.
Value addition: important terms

„Working class‟ or „urban poor‟
Some historians suggest that it is preferable to use the term „urban poor‟ for
India, which includes factory workers but also informal labour such as bazaar
manual workers, coolies, artisans, craftsmen, transport and construction workers,
peddlers and hawkers, service groups such as sweepers and municipal workers
and so on within the same category. This is not only because such informal sector
workers are numerically dominant, but also because formal factory workers often
move back and forth between formal and informal factory employment and
because historically, wage work and self-employment always coexisted. This
would also mean that the question of labour politics would have to be located not
only within but also beyond the workplace or the factory, and take into account
neighbourhoods, marketplaces, domestic residences, slums, even villages of
migrant workers. Also, this would imply that workers‟ politics would have to be
seen as not only derived from a direct and immediate relation of production –
that between capitalist and worker – but also from other social and political
37

relations, such as of caste, with the state and so on. Interestingly, unlike the
romanticized rural poor of Gandhian nationalism, the urban poor in India was
very often taken, by both colonial officials and elite nationalists, as a dangerous
class. And yet, the logic of mass politics produced an urban populist language of
garibi and garib janta that would continue to influence Indian politics well into the
1970s.
Source: Gooptu, Nandini. 2001. The Politics of Urban Poor in Early 20th
Century India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
It however becomes clear from studies not only of India but also of Africa, Latin America
and other parts of Asia, that the so-called classic working class was really not available
anywhere except in England. That is, the English example of industrialization and
proletarianization was an exception – a local or provincial phenomenon that was actually
conditional upon England‟s colonial advantage. If peasants could be turned into industrial
proletariat in England, it was because England could turn its own colonies into locations
for peasant production of primary or raw materials. If the English working class appeared
to successfully wield bargaining power, at least for a length of time, it was also because
the English state and English capital found in the colonies an alternative source of cheap
and unfree labour. In other words, England‟s advancement – even in socialist or
communist terms – was based on the development of under-development in the
colonies.
In other words, instead of thinking that the Indian working class was a lesser image of
the classic English working class, because India was yet to fully modernize, it now
became possible to historically understand the Indian working classes on their own
terms. And it also became possible, through a study of colonial Indian labour, to develop
a critique of Euro-centric narratives of progressive and revolutionary proletarian politics,
which always saw Indian labour as „backward‟, semi-rural and lacking in working-class
consciousness.
Labour movements in India
We must keep three things in mind regarding labour movements in India. First, labour
laws in India were particularly regressive – thus, tea planters had magisterial powers to
judge, arrest and physically punish indentured labour, European coalfield-owners could
tie down miners in service-tenancy arrangements, and even as late as in 1934, 1938 or
1946, anti-union and anti-labour laws continued to be passed in India, ironically
sometimes with the complicity of the Indian National Congress. Unlike in England, in the
colony, thus, the state and the capitalists were far more openly in collusion, far less
publicly accountable and far more coercive and anti-labour in policy – all this creating far
greater difficulties in organizing labour movements here.
Second, as we have already mentioned, the nature of colonial industrialization meant

that the Indian working classes were forced to remain informal and scattered. This was
to the advantage of colonial capital, both British and Indian. For if workers remained tied
to village-bases, they could be more easily sacked when required, more easily pushed
back to subsist on rural household income and paid lesser wages, all on the ground that
they were seasonal and casual workers and therefore could not make full-scale claims on
38

factory employment. In other words, cheapness and flexibility of labour required that the
Indian working classes deliberately not be fully proletarianized. This informalization
prevented full-scale development of organizational and trade union politics amongst the
Indian working classes. This also meant that village, regional, caste and community ties
continued to remain alive amongst Indian workers, cutting across their urban, factory-
based, working-class experiences and solidarities.
Thirdly and consequently, the Indian working classes had a complicated relationship to
the politics of identity – whether it be national, religious or caste identity. In the rest of
this lesson, we shall dwell more elaborately on this third point – namely, that of the
relationship between workers, nation, caste and community.

Are prostitutes workers?
Recently, it has been argued that people engaged in sex-trade must also be seen
as part of the working class. Therefore, the call to rename prostitutes as sex-
workers and call for valid licensing of sex-work in order to decriminalize
prostitution and render sex as a legitimate and legal form of labour. Many
organizations today demand worker‟s rights and welfare measures on behalf of
sex-workers. Some argue that the denigration of sex work depends on viewing
sexual activity as an expression of one‟s intimate, authentic self, a patriarchal
view in itself. If sex work could be seen as a socially necessary and performative
task, rather than a private and moral issue, it could also be seen as a legitimate
profession.
Ashwini Tambe has written a history of sex-work and prostitution laws in colonial
India – which shows how moral-political debates about sex-work amongst both
colonialists and nationalists worked to legitimize marriage as the only form of
sexuality permissible in modern times. This meant that historically sex-work
became defined as „crime‟ rather than labour, and also that sex-work became
subject to international discourses on commercial sex, venereal disease,
trafficking in women and policing. Unlike in some pre-colonial elite courtesan
cultures, thus, in colonial modern times, sexual expertise could no longer be seen
as a source of power or identity.
Source: Tambe, Ashwini. 2009. Codes of Misconduct: Regulating
Prostitution in Late Colonial Bombay. New Delhi: Zubaan.
Historians have told the story of labour unrest in India in great detail. Labour unrest
began as early as in the 1890s in the jute industry in Calcutta. There was greater unrest
during the first World War due to wartime price-rise and decline of real wages, leading to
many strikes, including the famous Ahmedabad textile strike in which Gandhi became
active. The Bombay textile workers struck eight times between 1919 and 1940, each
time industrial action lasted for more than one month and in 1928-29, lasted for more
than a year. The depression years of 1929-30 saw very high levels of industrial unrest
again – the most famous being that of 26 thousand TISCO workers in Jamshedpur and of
272 thousand workers in Calcutta jute mills. Also famous were the railway strikes of
1928 and 1930 and the legendary mutiny on the ships of the Royal Indian Navy in 1946.
39

In fact, in India, the working classes as a political community came into being through
the experiences of these militant movements. The question to ask is, therefore, not
whether there was a working class in India which could produce a radical politics for
change, but whether politics itself was able to produce a radical working class in colonial
India. The answer clearly is yes.
However, historians have also shown the fraught nature of some of these labour
movements. In the Madras textile strike of 1921, for instance, dalits or Adi Dravidas
acted as strike-breakers against caste Hindu and Muslim unionists. Communal riots
occurred between Hindu and Muslim workers with fair regularity, including in Calcutta,
the city at the heart of militant labour action in colonial times and after. Often industrial
action would be directly against the state and police rather than against employers, such
as in the disturbances against plague measures in 1900 in Kanpur or in the Machli Bazar
riots of 1913, making it difficult to distinguish between general urban unrest and
working-class movement. Historians, however, also disagree with the argument that
caste or community ties necessarily fragment labour solidarity. In fact, as many cases in
colonial India show, caste ties, or religious rhetoric, or mosques and gurudwaras as
congregation spaces, could also at times aid the creation of a workers‟ political
community. Again caste or community ties were not always dominant in Indian labour
politics. In particular contexts, like in the Kolar Gold Fields of Mysore, there was a
growth of rationalism and atheism amongst workers, who were mostly dalits and
Buddhists. (Bandopadhyay 2004)
Nationalists and working-class politics
In other words, what we see here is an enormous complexity in the nature of labour
movements – disallowing any easy generalization or stereotype about working-class
politics in India. However, all these complexities were framed unmistakably by
nationalism. Whether we study communal riots by workers or caste mobilizations
amongst them or even trade unionism per se, there is no denying the articulation of the
question of the nation and community with the question of caste and labour. Thus, in
Bombay mills, migrant workers‟ political alignments were often influenced by their rural
community ties with recruiters or sardars and also with each other. (Chandravarkar
1994). In Kanpur, several leading Congressmen who were connected with the Mazdoor
Sabha in the mills were also actively involved in the local Hindu Sabha and its shuddhi
activities, so that both Muslim workers and Muslim traders of the city felt alienated.
(Joshi 2003, 270) Ambedkar made a fundamental connection between caste and labour
politics. He renamed his own politics as a struggle against „capitalism and Brahminism‟,
started the Independent Labour Party in 1936 to fight khots (landlords) and urban
capitalists and criticized Gandhi and the Congress as a whole for selling out to business
interests. (Ambedkar 1937)
40


Ambedkar and the working class
It must not be forgotten that lowly caste-status in India was historically a
function of menial or degrading labour of some people in service of others, which
means that caste as an issue had a special relevance to thinking on the labour
question in India. Not surprisingly, therefore, Ambedkar was deeply concerned
with working class politics.
Sukhdeo Thorat narrates Ambedkar‟s involvement with the labour movement as

follows. As a member of the Bombay legislative council (1925 onwards), as the
leader of the Independent Labour Party (1936- 42) and as labour minister in the
central cabinet (1942-46), Ambedkar worked in a number of ways for the cause
of agricultural labour, industrial workers and peasants. He introduced the Khoti
System Bill and the Mahar Watan Bill to reform agrarian relations. With the
Communist Party, Ambedkar organised the biggest pre-independence
mobilization of peasants in Maharashtra. He led a march of 20,000 poor peasants
to the Bombay assembly to demand reduction in the irrigation rate, debt relief
and minimum wages for agricultural labour. Along with moderate labour leaders
and communists, Ambedkar organized a general strike of textile workers in
November 1938 against the Industrial Dispute Bill of September 1938 which had
made strike illegal under certain circumstances and affected the rights of the
workers. Nearly one lakh workers from 60 different unions participated in the
strike. This was the climax of dalit-Left unity. Ambedkar sought (i) provision of
safeguards and social security measures, (ii) equal opportunity for workers and
employers to participate in formulation of labour policy, and (iii) establishment of
a machinery for enforcement of labour laws and settlement of disputes. To
achieve this, Ambedkar wanted (a) setting up of an Indian labour conference and
standing labour committees, (b) enactment of labour laws, (c) establishment of
chief labour commissioners, (d) constitution of investigative labour committees,
and (e) recognition of trade unions.
[Ambedkar] agreed with the Marxists that conflict between classes and private
ownership of property were the root causes of exploitation. But he differed with
their approach towards the caste question. In the mid-1930s he criticized
communists for reducing the labour question to a purely economic, class question
– and thus not quite admitting the social and political centrality of caste in India.
Ambedkar said that the "dalits will not join in socialist revolution for equalisation
of property unless they know that after the revolution is achieved they will be
treated equally and that there will be no discrimination of caste and creed". He
asked, "Can it be said that the proletariat of India, poor as it is, recognises no
distinction of caste. Karl Marx argued that the proletariat have nothing to lose
except their chains. But the artful way in which the social, religious and even
economic rights are distributed among different castes whereby some have more
and some have less, even the high caste poor know that if a general dissolution
comes they stand to lose more of their privileges than their low caste
counterpart".
41

Source: Thorat, Sukhadeo K. 2000. Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar: Film as a

Lost Opportunity. Economic and Political Weekly Vol. 35 No. 15: 1236-
1239.
Undoubtedly, strike-waves often came in tandem with nationalist agitations. Hence the
huge number of strikes during the non-Cooperation movement in the 1920s and the Quit
India movement in 1942. Yet the Congress and working-class politics had an ambiguous
relationship. On the one hand, workers often used the rhetoric of nationalism to draw
legitimacy for themselves and even made more radical nationalist demands than the
Congress itself. Thus in the 1928 Calcutta session of the Congress, 30, 000 workers took
over the platform and passed resolutions for complete independence and for a labour
welfare scheme. Clearly, there was no denying the mass appeal of working-class politics.
So in 1919, the Congress adopted a resolution at its Amritsar meeting to encourage the
formation of labour unions throughout India. Indeed, even the colonial state was forced
to grant representation to labour in its legislative councils in 1919. On the other hand,
the Congress developed a close relationship with influential Indian capitalists. Gandhi
would criticize politics of conflict between capitalist and labour, and talk of class harmony
and trusteeship, by which rich businessmen were exhorted to use their wealth morally
and benevolently in the name of the poor. Gandhi would also disagree vehemently with
those, namely communists, who tried to use union activities for „political‟ purposes. The
result was that the Congress encouraged labour unrest only in sectors where the
capitalists were white, such as in tea plantations and the jute industry. But Congress
tried to use co-opted trade unions to play conciliatory roles in sectors where national
capital dominated. Such was the role of the Jamshedpur Labour Association and Gandhi‟s
loyal Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association. When the Congress came to power in
provincial ministries in 1937, a number of trade union leaders became labour ministers
and there was a spectacular rise in labour militancy in 1937-38. But this was also the
moment when the Congress supported the passing of the Bombay Trades Disputes Bill
and other similar laws, taking a decisive anti-labour turn in its policy, all the while
arguing that class politics should be disavowed in the name of the unity of all classes for
the sake of the nation. (Bandopadhyay 2004)

Trade unions in India
The first Factory Act in India was passed in 1881. The 1890s was a phase of
labour strikes and the slow beginning of labour associations. Small associations
like the Bombay Mill-Hands Association came up. Between 1918 and 1923, many
unions came into existence in India. The first organized trade union, Madras
Labour Union, was formed in 1918. At Ahmedabad, under Gandhi, occupational
unions like spinners‟ unions and weavers‟ unions were formed. These unions
federated into the Textile Labor Association in 1920. The formation of the
International Labour Organisation (ILO) in 1919 was also critical at this time. In
1920, The All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC)) was established. Many of its
leaders were Congressmen. Soon however the communists took over the trade
union movement in India. The Girni Kamgar Union in Bombay was formed in 1924
and was an exemplary communist organization. In 1926, the first trade union law
was enacted in India. In 1928,the All India Trade Union Federation (AITUF) was
formed. The next phase of trade union formation would come immediately after
42

1947, and CITU would become the largest communist-led labour union in India.
Source: Various
Socialists and working-class politics
The obvious result of this nationalist „betrayal‟ was the rise in the influence of
communists amongst the workers and the poor of India. The rise of Workers and
Peasants Parties or WPPs in eastern and western India was the result of communist
politics. So was the rise of radical unions such as the Girni Kamgar Union in Bombay and
the Bengal Chatkal (jutemill) Mazdoor Union in Bengal. Communists believed in Marx‟s
statement that the working class was the sole revolutionary force that could change
capitalist inequalities and therefore, working-class politics was their priority area.
Communists were also able to, at least on some occasions, address communal and caste
questions. Thus in Kanpur, the communists addressed and mobilized Muslim workers
who had been alienated by Congressmen with Arya Samaj and Hindu Sabha tendencies.
Again in Maharashtra, communists allied for a while with the Ambedkarite movement
outside the Congress. And yet, the communists also, in the long run, failed to address
the caste question and the gender question that were critical to the labour issue itself.
While dalits clearly stated that their oppression was very much to do with their being
pushed to do degraded labour, the communists refused to acknowledge fully the fact
that caste and the question of work were social and political questions, which could not
be understood only in terms of pure economics of class. Similarly, while women workers
clearly showed themselves doubly burdened by exploitation at work and at home –
marked by their doing less-paid labour outside and unpaid labour at home – the
communists continued to see the gender question as secondary to the class question.
Most ironically, however, the communist role in labour movements in India was
circumscribed by their fraught relationship with nationalism itself. Sometimes, the
communists saw the national movement as an elite movement and therefore tried to
operate politically outside the Congress. Sometimes the communists, because of the
sheer scale and reach of the Congress, thought it best to try to take over the Congress
and work through it. Sometimes, the communists talked of a „united front‟ with the
Congress. In effect, sometimes they agreed to postpone the question of equality and
give priority to the question of national unity and freedom, sometimes they argued that
without granting of equal conditions, nationalism could never successfully harness the
force of popular militant action against colonial state. During the second World War, the
communists even decided to support the colonial state in the name of a „peoples war‟
against Nazism, exactly at the moment when the Congress decided to launch the Quit
India Movement in order to pressurize a colonial state, besieged and weakened by its
European war-effort, into accepting nationalist demands. Of course, add to this the fact
that the communist parties were repeatedly banned, persecuted and outlawed by the
colonial state, sometimes with the support of the Congress itself! In other words, while
the communists were far more effective in working class politics and far more effectively
criticized the Congress nationalist policy vis a vis labour, they too were quite conflicted in
their relationship to labour unrest. And this precisely because of the unresolved
communist relationship to nationalism.
43

Value addition: from the sources

Early writings on communism
“For those who are indispensable, their indispensability is their wealth. So long as
they do not realize this self-value, they sell cheap… Thus, till now, states of
Europe conquered the world by riding the backs of slaves …today the slaves are
beginning to shake the masters off their backs. … Not that the solidarity of the
erstwhile slaves is the ultimate solidarity. For here too antangonism rules. But
there is something significant in this solidarity emerging amongst European
workers today. There is now hope that this solidarity might transcend the
boundaries of nations.” Rabindranath Tagore, „Samhati‟, Samhati, 1923
“We shall awaken. We shall find out what makes us small. Samyavadi has come
to show us the way. … We shall educate ourselves, learn the principles of our
faith. Yet we shall farm, weave, fish, work at the oil-press. What sin that is we
do not know. But we shall not remain small. …Come let us see why we have no
place even though we are the life-force of society. The call of khuda, of rasul and
of our brothers ring out. Come brother, rise brother, let us awaken” „Chhotor
Aparadh‟, Samyavadi, 1923
“The communist does not say that I am for all, or that all are for me; his message
is, just as I am for all, all are for me.
This is the main principle of communism. It has released humankind from both
senseless accumulation and useless sacrifice; this is not a message of
disinterestedness and self-sacrifice, it asks for a coming together of interests,
one‟s interest with collective interest. Of course, this has become the thorn in the
way of those few who wish to become a Buddha or a Jesus. This has made self-
interest itself respectable. I give just as I get back, as if in the kiss …” Shibram
Chakravarty, “Moscow versus Pondicherry” , 1st edition, 1929.
Source: Sarkar, Sipra et al. eds. 1998. Bangalir Samyavad Charcha.
Kolkata: Ananda Publishers, 50, 54, 108-09.
Our account above explains why the labour question never really got resolved with
independence, for the relationship between nationalism and workers‟ politics was already
tense in the pre-1947 years. After independence, unsurprisingly therefore, the Indian
state violently repressed labour and peasant movements. Till the late 1970s high labour
militancy was a mark of Indian politics as were questions of unemployment and wages,
but through the 1980s and 90s organized trade unions stood weakened before the
rhetoric of growth, export and liberalization. Currently, the question of unorganized
labour and it‟s welfare has come back to haunt the Indian state. And Indian historians,
who were more preoccupied with the peasant question in the 1970s and 80s, have
revived the field of labour history and culture from a post-Marxist perspective.
44

10.5: Dalits
Introduction: what is in a name?
Low-caste or outcast groups in India first began using the term „dalit‟ in the 1930s, in a
self-conscious effort at naming themselves anew. At the outset, therefore, let us spend a
few moments in thinking about what lay behind the use of the name dalit.
Till the use of the term dalit, low-caste or outcast groups were generally called
„untouchables‟ – meaning those traditionally considered impure or polluting by touch or
proximity. Clearly, despite being an apparently descriptive word, untouchable was a
humiliating name to carry. „Untouchables‟ were also officially known as the „depressed
classes‟ in colonial administrative parlance. This label too had a humiliating connotation,
because it implied that these were people who were powerless and passive, to be saved
only by others, in this case by the English. Understandably, therefore, there began, from
the second half of the nineteenth century, a search for alternative names, which could
produce a more positive identity for low-caste people. In Maharashtra, Jyotirao Phule
talked of the Atishudra and later the Bahujan, implying the lowest of castes, the
poorest or the masses. In Bengal, Vivekananda reinvented the traditional term, shudra
by making it interchangeable with the „poor‟ and talked of the coming of a democratic
shudra revolution. In Madras, the Justice Party and later Periyar talked of the Adi
Dravida, implying that untouchables were the earliest and most original inhabitants of
the Tamil land. More famously, in early twentieth century, Gandhi renamed the
„untouchable‟ Harijan, implying thereby that they were god‟s own people, who must be
served, just as one served god, as part of one‟s nationalist duty or dharma. However,
compared to all these labels, the name dalit would acquire a far greater political force by
1930s.
The term dalit – literally „crushed‟ or „broken‟ people – served to highlight the
exploitation, coercion and violence that made up the life of the lowest castes of India.
This meant that more than any of the other names, dalit was a far stronger oppositional
term – it was the name for a fighter, the name for a counter-force, so to speak. Gandhi‟s
Harijan made a moral claim on service and care, Periyar‟s Adi Dravida made a nationalist
claim on rights of birth and belonging, Phule‟s Bahujan claimed the strength of numbers.
But the dalit demanded a fight, and therefore became a powerful political – rather than
only a social and cultural – imaginary.
It is therefore important to remember that the name dalit is a rather new one – assumed
less than a hundred years ago. So, when we talk of dalit politics, we actually talk of a
modern phenomenon. We might think, and rightly so, that caste is a very old issue in
our history, and so must be struggles against caste oppression. But these earlier lower-
caste struggles can by no means be called dalit movements. For one, by the colonial
modern times, caste – both as category of thought and as concrete identity – had
fundamentally changed in nature. (see chapter 6, lesson 5 on the question of caste and
modernity) For the other, strictly speaking, there was no sociological group known as the
dalit before the 20th century. There were many low-caste and outcast groups – who
were treated as untouchables by upper castes – but known by different names in
45

different regions and in different times. Many of these names continued to be used in
modern India, such as Chandala, Chamar, Bhangi, Mahar, Parayar, Mala, Madiga, Pulaya
and so on. What the new term dalit sought to do – and did successfully in time – was to
cut across this multiplicity of names and produce, through political consolidation, one
shared and common identity and a powerful political bloc within the nation. How the dalit
became such a powerful and transformational force in the nation is precisely what this
topic is about.
Forms of mobilization
Dalit politics in India has been many-faced and complex, involving changing forms of
protest and mobilization. Early in the 19th century, the caste system began to be
questioned by social reformers, faced with Western missionary criticism that Hinduism
oppressed women and „untouchables‟. Such reformist questioning – e.g. by Rammohan
Roy and his Brahmo Sabha or by Young Bengal radicals, who repudiated the sacred
thread and even ate beef – was, however, still limited by the predominantly upper-caste
background of these reformers. We also see in this period large-scale conversion by
dalits (and adivasis) to Christianity, especially in the south, as a way of escaping
structures of Brahminical hierarchy. However, despite conversion and some access to
missionary education, dalits were still forced to conform to existing social inequalities,
just as they had to in pre-colonial times despite their conversion to Islam.

Dalits and slavery
Pulayas and Parayas of Kerala defined their low-caste condition as slavery. The
term „slavery‟ assumed a great political charge in context of dalit politics here –
partly because agrestic and chattel slavery was a real condition in upper-caste
and Syrian Christian estates here; partly because, in the mid-19th century, there
emerged a movement for abolition of slavery and slave trade in England and the
United States. [Interestingly, Jyotirao Phule too used „Gulamgiri‟ or slavery as the
name for his important tract on caste.]
Source: Mohan, P. Sanal. 2007. Imagining Equality: Modernity and Social
Transformation of Lower Castes in Kerala. PhD thesis. Mahatma Gandhi
University. Kottayam.
The 19th century also saw heterodox religious movements by lower-caste communities,
in protest against dominant rituals and hierarchies of Brahminical Hinduism. Many of
these religious communities were centred around iconic spiritual leaders, like Sri
Narayana Guru in Kerala, and around principles of equality, solidarity, self-help and
devotion. Many also asserted the prior right of dalits to land and territory as original
inhabitants of the country, like the Ad Dharma movement amongst Chamars of Punjab
and Adi Hindu movement amongst urban dalits in U.P. Many even sought to radically
invert existing hierarchies, putting the Brahman at the bottom of society, like the
Balahari sect amongst Hadis of Bengal and the Satnami movement amongst Chamars of
Chattisgarh.
46

Even when lower castes did not form alternative communities, they questioned upper-
caste religious and symbolic monopolies of various kinds – such as the right to wear the
sacred thread, the right to enter temples, the right to wear footwear or carry umbrellas
in the presence to persons of high ritual status, the right to wear the breast-cloth even if
one was a low-caste Nadar or Ezhava woman, the right to participate in community
affairs such as pujas and festivals and the right to draw water from a common village
well. Many of these forms of mobilization began in the 19 th century but became stronger
in the 20th.
The fact that many low-caste groups sought to appropriate upper-caste religious and
social symbols – such as the sacred thread – has been interpreted by some scholars as
signs of Sanskritisation (Srinivas 1966). Sanskritization was defined as a process by
which lower-castes imitated rather than challenged, upper castes and thus became
upwardly mobile within the caste hierarchy. It is true that in some instances, the
adoption of upper caste practices took a conservative form. Thus, some lower-caste
groups began enforcing stricter controls over their women – disallowing widows from
remarrying or wives from working outside home – because such conduct was seen as
proper to high status. But there were also many instances in which upper-caste spaces
and symbols – like the temple or the village well – were radically transformed through
lower-caste struggles. There were many instances of upper-caste symbols being decried
and destroyed too – such as the public burning of the Manusmriti. In any case, the fact
that the appropriation of upper-caste symbols was often a matter of collective and direct
public action, and was resisted violently, made this a politically radical issue.
We have talked above of forms of protest involving apparently religious principles. In a

sense, though, these were as much secular forms of protest because they brought the
question of power to the centre of socio-religious discourses and thus politicized them.
But there were other forms of lower-caste mobilization that were more obviously
recognizable as secular forms. At the centre of this was the question of education and
knowledge. Brahminical superiority was supposedly based on their special access to
knowledge and to the language of knowledge, namely, Sanskrit. Low castes were denied
access to Sanskrit, to scriptures, and to institutions of learning. In colonial times too,
modern knowledge-forms as well English as a language were rapidly cornered by upper
castes, because of their already existing educational advantages. Even more
importantly, unlike the elite in pre-colonial times, the English colonizer and the educated
Indian now claimed that knowledge and science were indifferent to caste – thus
pretending as if everybody, irrespective of caste status, had equal access to modern
education and educational institutions. What this did was to disguise the very real
inequalities that prevented lower castes from historically accessing knowledge, and this
reinvented upper-caste dominance as no longer merely caste dominance, but as secular,
purely meritocratic, intellectual dominance. So in colonial-modern times, questions of
education, knowledge and language would become central to lower-caste struggles.
Already in the 19th century, conversion to Christianity was inspired by the promise of
education for dalits in missionary schools and of the consequent opening up of new
employment opportunities. By late 19th century, Jyotiba Phule opened schools for lower
castes, and for women, as his primary reform act. In the 20 th century, Ambedkar
emphasized the liberatory potential of modern English education for the dalit. In Tamil
Nadu, resistance to Sanskrit and love for Tamil took the form of the argument that
47

Sanskrit, and Hindi, were signs of north Indian Brahminical colonization of local peoples,
who were relegated to lower-caste status through the wielding of an elite and alien
language and intellectual system.
Lower-caste struggles also took the form of associational politics. Caste associations had
become common in India from the late 19th century. With the coming of ethnological
surveys and censuses by the colonial state, which recorded caste names and numbers
across India, there began movements amongst various castes to get themselves
officially registered as castes of higher status and of greater numbers. From now on,
caste no longer functioned through local jati samajs but through larger regional,
sometimes even all-India, caste associations. These caste associations became in a new
way conscious of their numerical strength as well as of their strict boundary vis a vis
other castes. These associations combined the sensibility of caste as identity of birth
with the sensibility of caste as identity produced out of collective and voluntary public
work such as education and reform for caste members. These associations thus
gradually recreated caste as a new kind of self-aware, number-based political bloc.
One powerful example of associational politics was Jyotiba Phule‟s Satyashodhak Samaj
(Truth Seekers‟ Society), which gave strong competition to Bal Gangadhar Tilak‟s
Brahmin-dominated Poona Sarvajanik Samaj, by questioning the latter‟s ability to
represent the cause of the poor peasant.

Caste and history
Many low-caste thinkers questioned the standard nationalist version of Indian
history. For them, India had an inglorious past, marred by relentless jati
exploitation. Here is Phule, defending Pandita Ramabai‟s decision to marry a
Shudra and then, after widowhood, convert to Christianity. He writes in 1885, the
same year that the Indian National Congress was founded.
“Shudra to Brahmin: Your ancestors came from Iran and invaded all the original
inhabitants of this country. …They enslaved the shudras and deprived them of
their right to learning. Many of them were reduced to untouchability…
We shall adopt Christianity or Islam whenever we feel like it for our convenience.
Or perhaps we shall ask for a religion for us from our creator…”.
[This historical imagination, shared by others like Ambedkar and Periyar, saw the
lower caste as the original nation, the Aryan/Brahmin/Hindu as foreign.]
Source: Phule, Jyotirao. 1885. Satsar, 1. In G. P. Deshpande ed. 2002.
Selected Writings of Jyotirao Phule. New Delhi: Leftword, 207, 210.
Phule‟s organization consolidated the Shudras and Atishudras and talked about the
antagonism between Bahujan samaj or the masses and the rich shetji-bhatji, or
merchant and Brahmin. This helped the Kunbi peasants of Maharashtra, who assumed a
warrior or Kshatriya status and eventually the identity of the original Maratha.
Interestingly, this had the result of separating out the Marathas from dalits such as
48

Mahars and Mangs of Maharashtra, who were being denied, almost exactly at this time,
their earlier „martial race‟ or warrior image and their privilege as colonial military
recruits. (Omvedt 1976)
In other words, what we see here is something which will be quite common to
associational caste politics in general in India – namely, an internal conflict within the
lower-caste cause by which the so-called middling, peasant castes acquired a distinct,
elite identity, at the exclusion of the dalits. Thus, Maharashtra saw a range of lower-
caste organizations – from the conservative to the radical. The Non-Brahman
Association, of relatively well-off middle castes, remained loyal to the British and hoped
for special representation through colonial legislative reforms. The radical strand of the
Satyashodhak Samaj participated in socialist activities, thus combining class and caste
politics. This group would eventually join the Indian National Congress, and participate in
militant anti-colonial agitations. The dalit cause, however, took on another, more radical
organizational form under Ambedkar, who would have a far more complicated
relationship with the Congress, and would have to repeatedly form separate
organizations of his own – such as All India Depressed Classes‟ Congress in 1930, the
Independent Labour Party in 1936, the All India Scheduled Caste Federation in 1942 and
so on. (Zelliot 1992)
Representation
Central to associational politics was the politics of representation, which would become
increasingly important in the 20th century. Lower castes argued that they had been
historically excluded from education, employment and political institutions in India,
which meant that, even though they were part of the nation, their voices had never been
represented adequately. They pushed the colonial state for measures of „protective
discrimination‟ – such as caste-based reservations in educational institutions,
employment and legislatures – thus adding a new dimension to the question of real and
formal equality in Indian politics.
The most complicated representational question was that of elections. It was in 1928
that Ambedkar first argued, in his evidence before the Simon Commission, that in the
absence of universal adult franchise, a separate electorate was the only way to ensure
fair representation for the dalit. The logic behind this argument was as follows – if only
individuals with a minimum property and a minimum tax-paying capacity were allowed
to vote, then most dalits remained excluded from voting as they were from poorer
sections of society and did not have the requisite property and did not pay the requisite
taxes. Therefore, the only way to get a voice in the legislatures was for dalits to have a
separate electorate, where only dalits could contest elections and only dalits could vote.
This would become the biggest bone of contention between Gandhi and Ambedkar.
49

Film clip and audio:
In 2002, a biopic was made on Ambedkar by director Jabbar Patel. Check out clips of it
at www.ambedkarfilm.com. And also at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wzn8h0RtDvg. If you are interested in a
documentary, there are many good ones. One relatively recent one is Stalin K's „INDIA
UNTOUCHED - Stories of a People Apart‟, 2007. Here is also the voice of Ambedkar along
with some still pictures of his historic journey at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJ4uM6bBB.
When the Communal Award of 1932 granted separate electorates to dalits, Gandhi saw
this as a colonial measure to divide the Indian nation. This was further complicated by
the fact that separate electorates was also a Muslim League demand, and was seen by
the Congress as a communal political line. Gandhi, therefore, went on a fast unto death
against the Communal Award, till Ambedkar had to succumb to emotional and moral
pressure and give up the demand for separate electorates. By the Poona Pact between
Gandhi and Ambedkar, the latter accepted the idea of reserved seats for scheduled
castes in the place of separate electorates. Ambedkar saw this as a refusal on the part of
Gandhi to make caste into a political question. He felt that Gandhi and the Congress
wanted to keep caste away from mainstream politics by labeling it as a pure social
question, less urgent than the political question of national independence.
Caste/Nation
The most vexed question that emerges out of the above account is the difficult
relationship of dalit politics with mainstream Indian nationalism. The Indian National
Congress began as a group of upper-caste, middle-class men, and this social exclusivity
continued to mark it till about the 1920s. It is true that with the coming of Gandhi, this
changed somewhat. Gandhi made untouchability one of his main issues, and in the Non-
Cooperation resolution of 1920 made swaraj conditional upon the abolition of
untouchability in India. Yet Gandhi did not necessarily reject the caste system as a
whole. He saw the varna system as India‟s cultural heritage and a form of social division
of labour that was superior to the class system of the West. He did participate in temple
entry movements, symbolically identified with the Bhangi or the sweeper and created
bodies such as the Harijan Sevak Sangh. But he was strongly against a separate political
identity for the dalit, and continued to see the untouchability issue as a matter of social
reform and reconstruction, rather than as a matter of national political agitation. No
wonder Ambedkar was deeply dissatisfied with the Gandhian position, and decided to
contest the 1937 elections separately from the Congress. His newly founded
Independent Labour Party, in the name of the „labouring classes‟, did very well in areas
such as Bombay, Central Provinces etc.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Ambedkar and the Congress would remain locked in a
dispute over the question of who was the true representative of the dalit cause. The
Congress would invoke Gandhi himself, along with some nationalist dalit leaders such as
50

Jagjivan Ram from Bihar, to prove that it represented both the nation and the dalits. The
Congress position implied that Ambedkar was not nationalist enough, because he saw
the dalit as a sectional interest, at the cost of national unity. Ambedkar, on the other
hand, would argue that the Congress imagination of nationalism was a Hindu, upper-
caste imagination. It might indeed win formal independence from the British but could
never offer the dalit, even in independent India, true equality and freedom from
bondage.

Dalit literature
Those who leave for foreign lands,
Embrace other tongues, dress in alien garb
And forget this country
- them I salute
Those who don‟t forget
And don‟t change even after being beaten up for centuries
- such hypocrites I ask:
What will you say if someone asked you –
What is untouchability?
Is it eternal like God?
What‟s an untouchable like?
Will you reply without hesitation
“Untouchable – that‟s me?”
That‟s why I say –
You who have made the mistake of being born in this country
Must now rectify it: either leave the country
Or make war! - Baburam Bagal

Source: Dangle, Arjun ed. 1992. Poisoned Bread: Translations from
Modern Marathi Dalit Literature. Bombay: Orient Longman, 70.
51

Caste/Region
Connected to the question of caste and nation was the question of caste and region in
India. This is best demonstrated by the lower-caste movement in the south. In the
Madras Presidency, Brahminical power, because it was tied traditionally to Sanskrit, was
seen as the historical result of Aryan invasion from the north, which had turned ancient
Dravidians into shudras and suppressed the ancient Tamil civilization, including the Tamil
language itself. In other words, the caste system was seen as a foreign imposition from
the north. The Ramayana, for instance, was seen as proof of this history of invasion from
the north – Ravana being the heroic victim of the conquering forces of Ram. This Tamil
nationalism led to a questioning of the dominant, Congress version of nationalism. It led
to a Tamil literary movement, to the famous writings of Iyothee Thass and M.
Masilamani, inspirers of the Adi Dravida (untouchable) cause, the reinvention of an
alternative Saivite devotionalism, and finally the formation of the Justice Party by
individuals who left the Congress to contest and win the 1920 elections. These elections
were boycotted by the Congress, which was then engaged in the Non-Cooperation
movement.

The non-Brahmin manifesto
In 1916 a group of prominent nationalists from the Madras Presidency, led by
T.M. Nair and Pitti Theagaraya Chetti, broke ranks with the Indian National
Congress and issued a controversial document called the „Non-Brahmin
Manifesto‟. Their Manifesto argued that Indians were not yet ready for self-rule,
and if the British granted self-rule to Indians it would result in the tyranny of
Brahmins over others. The Manifesto invoked the term „non-Brahmin‟ a full
thirty times.
Source: Pandian, M. S. S. 2003. Brahmin and Non Brahmin: Geneologies
of a Tamil Political Present. New Delhi: Permanent Black, 1-7.
While the Justice Party was an organization mainly of the relatively more affluent non-
Brahmins (Tamil Vellalas, Telegu Reddis and Kammas, Malabari Nairs etc), there also
emerged a far more radical strand alongside. This was the Self-Respect Movement
started by E. V. Ramaswamy Naicker or Periyar. Periyar too was a devoted activist of the
Gandhian Congress but left it because of Gandhi‟s refusal to reject the varna system as a
whole. Periyar sought to create the non-Brahmin as a dignified, revolutionary figure – a
self-respecter – who fought relentlessly not only Brahminism and „Aryan‟/north-Indian
subjugation, but also Hinduism as also all forms of inequalities, including, gender
inequality. Periyar‟s powerful movement produced, for the long-term, a strong Tamil
regional separatism. This led to the well-known anti-Hindi agitation in Tamil Nadu and
later the formation of Dravida Kazhagam in 1944, with Periyar as its leader.
Caste/Religion
Given the fraught relationship between nationalist politics and dalit politics in 20th-
century India, it was not surprising that at the time of independence, the Congress tried
52

integrating Ambedkar and his dalit supporters by making him a member of the
Constituent Assembly. After having contributed to the making of the Indian constitution
and to the new government as law minister, Ambedkar, disillusioned once again,
resigned in 1951 and in 1956 converted to Buddhism in a last great act of dissent from
mainstream Indian nationalism and its Hindu majoritarianism.
This brings to the fore the question of caste and religion. The dominant nationalist line,
exemplified best by Gandhi, was that Hinduism was India‟s cultural tradition. Caste
exploitation was not central to this „tolerant‟ Hinduism, only a form of its latter-day
corruption. Ambedkar and other dalit leaders disagreed, arguing that caste was central
to Hinduism and therefore the question of religion itself was central to India‟s caste
question. We have already mentioned the growth of dissident religious movements
amongst dalits and also contests around religious symbols like the sacred thread or the
temple within caste agitations. No less important were conceptual debates around the
idea of religion itself in the 20th century.
Ambedkar, the architect of India‟s secularist constitution, interestingly had a very

different idea of religion from that of standard Western secularism. He disagreed with
the secularist position that religion should be a private or personal matter. He argued
that religion, like language, was a social and collective phenomenon and that the right
kind of religion was essential for creating public solidarity and moral community.
Ambedkar saw caste as central to the Hindu religion, and therefore argued that since
untouchables were outcastes, they were therefore also outside the fold of Hinduism. This
was a very controversial position. On the one hand, this stood opposed to Gandhi‟s
imagination of a reformed Hinduism where untouchability would be abolished and
untouchables fully integrated into the Hindu civilizational fold. On the other hand, this
also stood opposed to the Hindu right, which sought of Hinduize and reconvert dalits and
tribals in order to count them all as Hindus and thus create a great Hindu numerical
majority, especially in areas like Punjab and Bengal where Muslims threatened to have a
fair numerical strength of their own. Ambedkar wrote profusely about the nature of
religion as an idea and the relationship of religion with politics and power – such as in his
Annihilation of Caste (1936), The Buddha and the Future of His Religion (1950) and The
Buddha and His Dhamma (1957). He argued that Hinduism as religion instilled harmful
values – such as of purity and pollution, of hierarchical access to education and of
renunciation and asceticism, which made little sense to poor untouchables. Buddhism, on
the other hand, spoke of equality and compassion. At the end of his life, disillusioned
with Hinduism and mainstream Indian nationalism, he converted to Buddhism, along
with three hundred eighty thousand of his followers. Barely a month and a half later, he
died.
Periyar, on his part, was an atheist and a rationalist. He argued that faith in god
prevented a full use of human reason, and that religion could never be shorn of priest-
craft and superstition. In a sense, Periyar moved from anti-Brahminism to anti-Hinduism
to anti-religion in his position. He argued that abolition of inequalities was possible only
through a full eradication of religion, and he was even prepared to destroy idols, temples
and pictures of deities. He was influenced by Soviet socialism in all this, and called his
philosophy samadharma or the dharma of equality.
53

Caste/Gender
Finally, gender. Since caste was by definition founded on a person‟s birth, the caste
system depended on a control of women‟s sexuality and of marriage and kinship
practices. It is not accidental, therefore, that it was dalit and low-caste leaders who most
aggressively asserted the importance of raising the gender question as part of an overall
critique of the caste system.
Thus, Ambedkar pointed out the relationship between the caste system and subordinate
position of women and fought relentlessly in support of the Hindu Code Bill, which gave
women equality in matters of property, divorce, inheritance and so on. He had to
struggle against the arguments of many Congress stalwarts, who argued that women‟s
right to inherit parental property or to divorce would break up the traditional Hindu joint
family. In fact, Ambedkar resigned from the government of independent India over the
issue that the Hindu Code Bill was not passed in the complete form that he had
campaigned for.
For Periyar too, the gender question was paramount. Thus, an important aspect of the
Self-Respect movement was the public conduct of Self-Respect marriages, sans parental
consent, priests, mantras and mangalsutras. Self-Respect marriages only depended on
the consent of the partners and their agreement to respect each other‟s views. Periyar
argued that marriage was fundamental to women‟s enslavement because it forced
motherhood upon her. So Self-Respect marriages were founded on the woman‟s right to
divorce, abortion, contraception, property and work outside the home. These were all
issues that were debated publicly. Periyar also wrote cuttingly against notions of chastity
in women and masculinity itself – as ideologies meant to keep women in bondage.
(Geetha, V. 2003)

Body, filth, sex and violence
The question of gender also brings to the fore the question of the body per se.
The dalit body is seen as polluting by association with filth – with scavenging,
cleaning night-soil, clearing streets and sewerage and other such degrading work.
The dalit body is also brought to the fore through questions of sex and sexual
promiscuity – thus the devadasi controversy in the south and the murali
controversy in Maharashtra were about the alleged sexual availability of dalit
women. And above all, violence against dalits – legally labeled as „caste atrocity‟
today – brings the immediate materiality of body, injury and death to the fore in
dalit politics. History-writing in India is only recently beginning to discuss the
question of the body vis a vis caste (Rao, Anupama. 2006. 2009).
Source: Original
54

10.6: Women
Nation and gender
In this lecture, we talk about women and Indian nationalism. But in order to do so we
must first understand that it is not enough to merely talk about the contribution of
women to nationalism. It is not enough to say that while men fought for Indian
independence, women also did. Nor is it enough to say that Indian women have been
„hidden from history‟, and must now be made visible by remembering their contributions
and sacrifices. In order to talk adequately about women and nationalism, we need to
first understand the gendering of nation and nationalism as a political formation.

Women, gender and sex
Feminist scholars distinguish three terms that are often used interchangeably
while talking of women – namely, women, gender and sex. The commonsensical
term woman, according to feminists, is neither a natural category (of non-men)
nor a homogeneous community (of sisterhood), for there are historically many
ways of being a woman. Different ways of being a woman in different times and
different places depend on the gendering of a society. Just as languages are
gendered in different ways, so are societies and nations – and it is this gendering
which produces different models of being woman and man, feminine and
masculine and thus sets the terms by which men and women function everyday
and participate in movements for change. Gender, in other words, is not a natural
or biological identity of a person. It is a historical, social and political construction
of how to be a man or a woman. Sex, on the other hand, has been conventionally
seen as the biological ground upon which gender is constructed. However,
feminist scholars today argue that even sex is not a purely natural fact.
Sexualities too are socially produced/regulated by dominant moral, medical,
cultural, even political discourses, which establish one kind of sexuality as normal
and proper and relegate all others – for instance, non-marital, non-monogamous,
non-heterosexual, non-reproductive sexualities – into the domain of deviance,
perversion, immorality or criminality.
Source: Original
Israeli scholar Nira Yuval-Davis, in a comparative study of nationalisms across the world,
uses the phrase „nationed gender and gendered nation‟ to indicate that in modernity,
gender is centrally constitutive of the political form of the nation. At the same time, she
shows, in modern societies gender politics is over-determined by nationalism and its
political imperatives. This is common to Palestine, Africa, central-eastern Europe, south
Asia and so on, despite their very different histories otherwise. And this is what
distinguishes modern forms of gender politics from pre-colonial and non-modern forms
of gender politics.
In India too, this has been the case. Here the emergence of the „women‟s question‟
happened in early 19th century (see lesson 6.4). When faced with the colonial criticism
that Indian society was enslaved because it enslaved its own women (and
55

„untouchables‟), many middle-class, educated Indians started a project of „social reform‟

against practices such as sati, female infanticide, child marriage, „prostitution‟ etc.
However, in this overwhelmingly male „social reform‟ project, women were merely the
„object‟ of reform rather than active and participatory subjects. By the end of the 19 th
century, even this limited version of the „women‟s question‟ became jeopardized. With
the growth of self-conscious nationalism, many influential leaders, such as Bal
Gangadhar Tilak, began arguing that it was anti-nationalist to loudly say that Indians
oppressed their own women and to invite the colonial state to make laws against such
oppression. For this allowed a foreign power to meddle in the internal matters of the
nation and tamper with „traditions‟, which only Indians could understand, appreciate or
choose to change. Partha Chatterjee has called this the „nationalist resolution of the
women‟s question‟ (Chatterjee 1993) – i.e. the emergence of a nationalism which no
longer wanted a public debate about the condition and rights of women.
This nationalism constructed the so-called private, domestic, feminine sphere as the
„interior‟ of the nation – an autonomous space where the cultural/moral/spiritual essence
of the nation rested and which had to be protected, at all costs, against western
contaminations and untoward changes. This reconstitution of the interior self of the
nation as the apparently uncolonized „home‟ of true Indian-ness led to a celebration of
„domesticity‟ itself – such that not only the elite but also poorer, lower-caste families
began to believe that keeping women at home and in purdah was a sign of social
propriety and respectability. It was this gendering of the Indian nation, and of
simultaneous „nationalization‟ of gender, that would determine the terms of women‟s
political participation in India from the early 20th century onwards.
Difference and equality
Globally, women have had to choose alternatively between two ideas –that of difference
and equality – as foundation for their own rights. Sometimes women argued that they
were the same as men – e.g. they had the same rationality and intelligence – and so
must be treated as equals in education or employment matters. Sometimes women
argued that they were different – e.g. they had to bear and rear children – and so must
be given special privileges, like maternity leave, in the same matters. Difference and
equality could also alternatively work against women. Sometimes saying that women are
different can justify discrimination, such as not employing women in the army or not
paying equal wages. Sometimes saying that women are equal and same can also justify
discrimination, such as refusing maternity leave or childcare facilities simply because
men do not claim them. In other words, politics of gender has been a continuous
negotiation of arguments of both difference and equality.
This gets further complicated in the context of nationalism. Nationalism is itself a claim
of difference – of a colonized people saying that they are not inferior to the colonizer, as
alleged, only different. That they must not be judged by so-called „universal‟ Western
parameters, but be allowed to set their own cultural, moral, aesthetic terms, which
might very well be incomprehensible or incommensurable to the West. This nationalist
claim of difference rests on the imagination of the nation‟s women as the embodiment of
this „difference and uniqueness‟ – of true Indianness, in our case – the untouched and
56

uncompromised cultural or spiritual or normative domain of the nation. Women of the

nation therefore bear the burden of having to carry a double difference – being different
from all men, on the one hand and being different from the west (and western women)
on the other. Women‟s demand for equality in India has been historically caught up in
this politics of nationalist and gendered difference.
It is true that in India, nationalism – i.e. the ideology that all peoples have a right to
political self-determination, no matter how different they may be – produced a general
atmosphere in which self-determination itself began to be seen as a general virtue.
Women too began to claim their own right to self-determination as part of this larger
nationalist mood. Also, as nationalism began to turn into a mass movement by the early
decades of the 20th century, it became clear that no mass movement was possible
without participation of the nation‟s women, who were half the population. Women‟s
rights and equality therefore had to be perforce acknowledged by nationalism as
ideology. In fact, one can say that the women‟s movement in colonial India began as a
constitutive part of nationalism, and not quite as a distinct movement for women‟s
rights. In some ways, this had its advantages. Unlike in England and America, where
women had to struggle long and hard in order to get the vote, in India women‟s right to
vote was acceptable right from the beginning – because it was part of the general
nationalist demand for the vote, which could exclude women only by weakening its own
case.
And yet, being part of nationalism was also a disadvantage. For one, as already
mentioned, nationalism placed the burden of being doubly different upon the nation‟s
women – such that many kinds of public postures and activities by Indian women were
frowned upon as westernized, anglicized and therefore not quite nationalist in character.
For the other, the question of women‟s equality was often pushed into the „social‟
domain – as something which was lesser than and dependant upon the more urgent
„political‟ question of national independence. The dominant argument was that once
India became independent, the national state would legislate to ensure women‟s
equality, for only a national state should have a right to undertake „social‟ legislation.
Therefore, it would only be in rare and exceptional moments – such as when the
American journalist Katherine Mayo published Mother India in 1927, depicting the
miserable, sexually-fraught lives of Indian women – that the „women‟s question‟ would
become priority for nationalist discourse and that too only momentarily (Sinha 2006).
The rest of the time, gender justice would be kept confined to a secondary social
domain. Thirdly, being subsumed under nationalism also meant that the Indian women‟s
movement would be needlessly complicated by the one fundamental problem of
nationalism – namely, communalism. In early women‟s organizations, Muslim, Parsi,
Hindu, even European women came together to discuss gender issues, including gender
problems internal to various religious traditions. But by the 1930s and 40s, with the RSS
starting the Rashtrasevika Samiti and Muslim League opening a women‟s branch, and
with the Congress and Muslim League pulling apart on constitutional and
representational matters, the organizational unity of women would be critically
jeopardized (Sarkar 2005). With Partition, the women‟s question would get fully
communalized – as men from each community would threaten to abduct and rape
women of the „other‟ community and kill or instigate suicide amongst their own wives
and daughters to prevent the same „dishonour‟ to the self (Menon & Bhasin 1998). In
57

other words, Indian women bore the brunt of militant and unbridled nationalism upon
their own bodies and lives.
Women and associations
Before women came to intervene in mass movements, women‟s politicization happened

in India through women-only organizations. Gail Pearson calls this an „extended female
space‟ – beyond the segregated, domestic sphere but short of being fully public (Pearson
1981). Initially, most of these were social or educational organizations, self-consciously
„non-political‟. But by early 20th century, many avowedly political organizations also
started. Sarala Devi Chaudhurani‟s Bharat Stree Mahamandal, set up in 1910,
campaigned for both women‟s education and Non-cooperation. Bangiya Nari Samaj
campaigned for women‟s voting rights and All Bengal Women‟s Union campaigned
against illegal trafficking of women. At the national level, the first political organization
started in 1917 was Women‟s Indian Association in Madras, led by Irish nationalist
Margaret Cousins and the Theosophist and Home Rule agitator, Annie Besant, Congress
president of 1917. In 1925, the National Council of Women in India was formed as a unit
of the International Council for Women. Most importantly, the All India Women‟s
Conference started in 1927, which campaigned for women‟s franchise, reform of
marriage and personal laws and for the cause of women labourers.
Most of these organizations were made up of relatively elite and middle-class women,
many of whom were also accused of being anglicized. In course of the national
movement, however, they were forced to engage with poorer and rural women. Also,
these organizations had women of various religions and even nationalities, on the ground
that gender was a common ground cutting across communities and even nations.
It is important to remember that these organizations mostly negotiated with the colonial
state for gender - just rulings – such as women‟s franchise or fixing a minimum age of
consent for marriage for women or places for women in legislative assemblies. They did
not launch explicitly political movements for these causes but urged the nationalists and
the Congress to support these demands. The Congress often did, such as when it
supported the Child Marriage Restraint (Sarda) Act of 1929 or when it gave voting rights
to women between 1921 and 1930 after being elected to provincial legislatures. But
there were contradictions here too. Women‟s organizations worked constantly under
pressure to stop dealing with the colonial state and even to snap its international
feminist connections – because true nationalism called for it (Sarkar 2005).
Nation and motherhood
In the early decades of the 20th century, including during the Swadeshi movement,
militant mobilization of women was in the name of motherhood. The nation was
thematized as motherland, already in the late 19th century, most famously by
Bankimchandra in his novel Anandamath and in his song Vande Mataram. Generally, this
implied that the woman‟s primary nationalist task was at home, i.e. to breed and rear
patriotic children and potential citizens and inspire her men to make patriotic sacrifices.
58

But the mother image was also appropriated by women in order to carve out a public
and militant role for themselves. After all, the mother figure could display a violent
streak in the form of goddess Kali, naked, blood-thirsty, with a foot on the chest of her
consort.
Figure 10.6.1: Chinnamasta (a form of Kali) one of the more ferocious images of Kali
Source: Sketch book catalogue, Kalighat, Kolkata, 19th Century. A collection of the
Gurusaday Museum, Joka, Kolkata.
The Kali as mother was an image popularized by women such as Nivedita, an Irish
nationalist turned disciple of Vivekananda – an image, before which the individual male
ego got crushed, turning him into a renunciatory, desireless, de-sexualised, purely
political self. This version of the potentially revolutionary self – which can court as well
as dispense death – became an important aspect of the patriotic tradition of
„revolutionary terrorism‟ in the 20th century. Sarala Devi Chaudhurani, niece of
Rabindranath Tagore and the creator of Bharat Stree Mahamandal (1910) became the
patron of revolutionary clubs, whose agenda was to read the Gita openly, anarchism
secretly, worship Kali and practice body-culture, martial arts, and even learn gun and
bomb-making. This constitution of a political self, which could push the limits of violence
and endurance, thus, also produced articulate women subjects, whose sexual and social
presence was imperative for the imagination of a legitimate political violence. Not only
did this produce many legendary „terrorist‟ women, it also complicated the more tame
imagination of the motherland as either the goddess Lakshmi, now hapless and bereft of
her wealth under colonialism, or as in the well-known painting by Abanindranath Tagore,
as an ethereal, spiritualized, soulful but passive woman.
59

Figure 10.6.2: Bharatmata by Abanindranath Tagore

Source: http://www.artofbengal.com
However, even the mother figure was not asexual – founded upon a woman‟s
reproductive identity, as it were. With the coming of Gandhi, however, the motherhood
idea was somewhat replaced by a sisterhood idea – recasting the nation as one large
family. Gandhi, it is well-known, used a strong spiritualist idiom and iconized Sita as the
ideal Indian woman. His rhetoric of self-discipline, non-violence, celibacy or
brahmacharya and selfless service or seva was familiar to ordinary women and enabled
them to join the nationalist movement in large numbers, seemingly without jeopardizing
traditional morality and sexual decorum. It has even been said that Gandhi himself
represented a somewhat feminized political self, in defiance of the colonial as well as
revolutionary rhetoric of masculinity and violence – which eased the entry of women into
the hitherto overly masculinized political domain (Nandy 1998). Even more interesting
were Gandhi‟s own „experiments with truth‟. Gandhi undertook a torturous disciplining of
his own sexual desire, which he provoked by physical intimacy with young women, and
thus publicized the idea that a true satyagrahi was one who conquered and tamed
sexuality itself. All this meant that women could come out and participate in public
activities without the threat of sexual compromise looming large. But this also meant
that women‟s political participation did not automatically question the traditional norms
of femininity, chastity and domesticity. The unease that the Gandhian movement would
have vis a vis the participation of poorer woman and above all, so-called „prostitutes‟
was proof of this conservative face of nationalization of women.
60


Nationalism and prostitution
The question of „prostitution‟ was quite central to both nationalism and the
women‟s movement. By late 19th-early 20th century, „prostitution‟ had been made
into a catch-all term – that included not only commercial sex-workers but also
dancing girls, singers, theatre performers, temple devadasis and so on, without
any sense of discrimination between them. This was the other side of the middle-
class, nationalist morality that reinvented the nation‟s women as chaste, domestic
and asexual. Even women‟s organizations shared this morality and campaigned,
e.g. for the abolition of the devadasi system, arguing that devadasis should lose
their traditional property, matrilineal inheritance and adoption rights. This
morality felt all the more threatened when so-called prostitutes decided to
engage in political activities, such as contribute to nationalist funds or become
Congress members or organize associations or unions. Gandhi famously refused
to let prostitutes become satyagrahis, because they were „worse than thieves‟.
Even the rhetoric of „rescuing‟ the fallen woman partook in the feeling that these
women were themselves criminals and threats to political morality.
Source: Tambe, Ashwini. 2009. Codes of Misconduct: Regulating
Prostitution in late Colonial Bombay. Delhi: Zuban.
Women in movements
Figure 10.6.3: Pritilata Waddedar, revolutionary terrorist

Source: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070826/images/2608Chittagong_Pritilata.jpg
61

Figure 10.6.4: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, feminist and educationist

Source: http://www.reflection.methopath.com/assets/images/Begum_Rokeya02.jpg
Figure 10.6.5: Kalpana Dutt, of Chittagong Armoury Raid fame and long-time communist
Source: http://www.pahar.org/drupal/files/images/rarecoll_image_010.jpg
62

Figure 10.6.6: Opening session at AIWC, Berar, 1947

Source: www.gettyimages.com
Despite the limits that nationalism set for women‟s politics, women did participate in
very large numbers in agitational politics – often against the intent of the nationalist
leadership, even Gandhi himself. Thus Sarojini Naidu took over the salt satyagraha when
Gandhi was arrested. Bi Amma, mother of Shaukat and Muhammad Ali, lifted her veil in
public, because in the movement all men were family to her. Ordinary wives and
daughters undertook front-line actions such as picketing and marches and even courted
arrest and went to jail without care for purdah or caste norms. Interestingly, women‟s
agitational capabilities came to the fore particularly when the male leadership was in
retreat – such as in the 1942 Quit India Movement, when, with the men under arrest,
large numbers of rural women led militant rallies and demonstrations, Sucheta Kripalani
kept the peaceful non-cooperation alive and Aruna Asaf Ali, despite Gandhi‟s warnings,
led underground revolutionary activities.
It bears mentioning here that the most telling involvement of women by the 1940s was
in the communist and socialist movements, despite the fact that through the 20 th
century women‟s share in labour and employment progressively fell and women workers
remained unheard in mainstream working-class politics. The workers‟ cause never
included issues such as absence of maternal and childcare facilities, uncertainty of
employment terms, harassment and sexual exploitation at work or at home. This was
because in communist/socialist ideologies, all inequalities were seen as secondary to and
derived from primary class inequality. Gender, therefore, could not figure in principle as
an autonomous area of politics and ideological debate.
63


Women and labour
Feminist histories of labour in south Asia show very clearly that by the 1920s, the
industrial labour-force had become largely male. Partly this was the result of the
nature of colonial capital, which saw greater advantage in recruiting single male
migrants from the countryside, because it was a flexible working-class which
could survive cut-backs and retrenchments by returning to their villages, where
small household economies were kept running by the women left behind. Women
migrants were, however, a far less flexible and far more classically
proletarianized, urban group, because women‟s migration generally meant that
village resources had been totally exhausted and there was nowhere to return
during lean employment seasons. This meant that women migrants, also marked
as sexually promiscuous and morally degenerate, were economically perceived as
a relatively unsuitable workgroup, which would make more permanent claims on
factory employment.
Partly, however, this was because of the rise of the ideology of domesticity within
nationalism, which reconstituted middle-class, upper caste wives and mothers as
the model of the ideal women of the nation – so much so that even lower classes
and castes found it imperative, in order to claim higher social status, to prevent
their women from working outside homes. Late 19th-early 20th centuries was also
the time when domestic service became feminized. Unlike in earlier elite
households, where domestic servants in large numbers were men, middle-class
households now employed primarily women – such that on the one hand, elite
women could be shown to be doing no household labour at all and on the other,
respectable women could be made to dissociate from the world of poorer working
women, from the vulgar culture of women petty traders, barbers, entertainers
and so on, with whom now the maid, rather than the mistress of the house,
would deal.
Needless to say, domestic labour, in governmental as well as nationalist terms,

was classified as unproductive labour. It is this history of women‟s labour, usually
believed to be unrelated and parallel to the history of politics, that must be
brought to bear upon our question of political subjectivity. After all, by the 1920s
and even partly within the Congress, questions of equality, justice and national
development became tied to the socialistic imagination of the worker as the
classical, modern-day political subject.
Source: Sen, Samita. 2001. Gender and Domesticity: Liberalisation in
Historical Perspective. UNEAC Papers no. 4; Banerjee, Swapna. 2004.
Men, Women and Domestics: Articulating Middle-Class Identity in
Colonial Bengal. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Already in the 1920s and 30s, many middle-class women such as Santoshkumari Gupta,
Prabhabati Dasgupta, Ushatai Dange etc had joined communist and trade union
activities, and even campaigned for the release of political prisoners. One gets to read
poignant memoires about how jail experience brought women of many classes and
64

castes together in an unprecedented solidarity – breaking up the earlier exclusive and

elite ambience of women‟s organizations. One also reads ironic anecdotes of how
husbands reacted, only sometimes with pride, at their wives going to jail. The
communist All India Students Federation had to open a separate girls committee to
accommodate the very large numbers of girls that joined the movement, bringing down
the average age of women political activists. In 1942, in Bengal, Women‟s Self-Defence
League mobilized rural women and organized relief during the famine of 1943. Anti-
fascist and socialist cultural movements also took shape during the second World War
and involved many women.
Value addition: interesting details

Love, marriage and politics
Here are a few glimpses of how of love, marriage and sexuality had a double
relationship to political mobilization.
Sucheta Kripalani recalls how her marriage to J. B. Kripalani was strongly

opposed by Gandhi, who said that love and marriage would only embroil J.B. in
household matters, compromising his political commitment. He forbade her to
meet or write to him and even tried persuading her to marry someone else, so as
to finally release J. B. for his political duties. She refused and J.B. and she got
married in 1936 against Gandhi‟s wishes. Gandhi forgave them only when they
later agreed to take brahmacharya or celibacy vows.
In Bhagat Singh‟s revolutionary socialist group, Yashpal and Prakashwanti were

discovered to be more intimate than permitted under revolutionary norms.
Chandrashekhar Azad sentenced Yashpal to death, but luckily he escaped and
lived to become a famous literary figure. One is not sure what happened to
Prakashwanti!
Sushila Chain, active on the Kisan front in Punjab, was being persuaded by the
local communist leaders that a revolutionary role was not quite appropriate for
her. They did not quite say that women could not be revolutionaries. But the
party wrote a letter to her, saying that unmarried girls became adults only at 21
and since she was younger, she should marry and then do as she pleased,
because on marriage a woman was considered independent!
Thoppil Bhasi, a communist ideologue and playwright in Kerala of the 1950s,

wrote in 1954 Ningel Ennee Communist Aakki or „You made me a communist‟. In
this he depicted romantic love across class and caste as another shade of political
„comradeship‟ and liberation from feudal patriarchy. Here love and struggle went
together, though under the shadow of an apprehension that the communist
movement might be misunderstood as immoral and bohemian!
Source: Kumar, Radha. 1993. The History of Doing. Delhi: Kali for
Women, 84, 85, 92; Arunima, G. 2005. Friends and Lovers: Towards a
Social History of Emotions in 19th and 20th century Kerala. In Bharati Ray
ed. Women of India: Colonial and Postcolonial Periods. Delhi: Sage, 155.
65

The two most dramatic moments of women‟s militancy were in the Tebhaga movement
by sharecroppers of Bengal for a fair share of the harvest and the Telengana movement
against the Nizam of Hyderabad, landlordism and the agrarian policy of the newly
independent Indian state. Tribal women were at the front in both these cases, and
questions of sexual exploitation, sexual assault, wife-beating, drunkenness were raised
and their intimate links with patriarchal, feudal oppression were exposed. And yet as
testimonies by women activists of this period (when women were „making history‟)
show, political comradeship with men did not necessarily or permanently change sexual
or marital equations. The women were expected to break all norms, even that of
motherhood, in order to join and revolutionize the movement, but they were also
expected to smoothly return to their domestic and quietist habits at the end of the
movement (Stree Shakti Sanghatana 1989).
More radical in feminist terms, however, was the Self-Respect movement amongst non-
Brahmins in Tamil Nadu, which offered a deeply gendered social and political critique of
casteism. A reading of family and marriage coverage in the Self-Respect weekly Kudi
Arasu between 1926-49 tells us that this was not just ideology, but a set of practical
strategies to constitute the „self-respecting modern couple‟ – through choice of names,
dress, home décor, everyday rituals, reproductive modes, and collective gatherings and
readings. The working out of the self-respecting couple was intended as a simultaneous
critique of caste-based inheritance norms as well as the patriarchal joint family. In other
words, the Self-Respect movement saw the family as both object of criticism and site of
struggle.
Independence
At and just after independence, women‟s relationship to nationalism was expressed in

two poignant ways. One, as already mentioned, was the experience of partition, mass
migration, uprooting of families and the attendant violence upon women by both men of
their own families and men of the „other‟ community and simultaneously, of women‟s
initiatives and organizations amongst „refugees‟ for rehabilitation, for land-rights and for
the right to employment. And two, the passing of the Hindu Code Bill, after much dilly-
dallying in 1955-56 – in the teeth of opposition by powerful nationalist leaders such as
Rajendra Prasad and Sardar Patel and in a staggered and piecemeal fashion – giving
women some rights in divorce matters, parental property, dowry/stridhan etc.
(Ambedkar resigned as law minister because he was dissatisfied at the incomplete and
fragmented nature of this reform of Hindu joint family system).
And yet, despite the generally frustrating resolution to the question of women and
nationalism, women had clearly been intensely politicized. As Tanika Sarkar says, the
history of women‟s struggle was indeed one of the central components of the
imagination of democracy upon which the newly independent nation-state was to be
founded. And yet post-independence years also saw a radical questioning of the very
category of the „Indian woman‟. Dalit and Muslim feminists pointed out that even within
the nation, women were not a homogeneous community. And that in pre-independence
times, Indian women‟s movement, like the national movement itself, saw the Indian
woman, by default, as primarily an urban, middle-class, upper caste, educated, Hindu
person. The movement, therefore, failed to fully articulate experiences such as that of a
66

rural, dalit woman of the scavenging caste. In other words, the „Indian woman‟ as a
category was itself in dire need of further democratization – and not surprisingly, there
would emerge an autonomous dalit women‟s movement by the 1970s, as a sure sign of
this democratization. But then that will be the story of the years to come.
67

Summary
 The Indian national movement began amongst the English-educated middle
classes in the late 19th century.
 However, radical anti-colonial movements amongst peasants and adivasis

predated the national movement by a century, though these anti-colonial
movements, even though patriotic, cannot be labeled nationalist or „Indian‟.
 In the course of the 20 th century, the Indian national movement acquired a mass
character, symbolized by the entry of Gandhi on the political scene.
 However, popular and mass movements remained autonomous from and even in
conflict with the Indian National Congress and with Gandhi himself.
 So one could say that the national movement was not a single movement at all
but many simultaneous movements, which contested the meaning of terms such
as „nation‟ and „freedom‟.
 The main axes of contestation during the time of the nationalist tmovement were
class, gender, caste, religion, language and ethnicity, which in turn complexly
articulated with each other. So while one thinks about the relationship between
say nationalism and caste, one must also think simultaneously about relationships
between caste and gender, caste and religion, caste and class.
 It must also be remembered that the national movement varied deeply across
regions. The movement in Bengal, for instance, was very different from that in
Tamil Nadu or Kerala or Punjab.
 The national movement also produced many ideologies, of which nationalism was
only one. Socialism, communism, feminism and communalism were others.
Political ideals such as land, freedom, justice, equality, unity, etc. were also
differently thought of by different groups within the nation.
 The study of the Indian national movement has also deeply changed over time.
Earlier forms of nationalist history-writing have been replaced by varieties of
Marxist histories, Subaltern Studies, feminist histories, regional histories, caste
histories, postcolonial studies and so on. These different historiographies were
produced by different choices of the vantage point from which nationalism was
studied – thus Subaltern Studies historians chose to study nationalism from the
perspective of peasants, others chose gender or caste or region and so on.
68

10: Exercises
Essay questions
1) Can one say that the Indian national movement was an elite movement?
2) Discuss the nature of the Indian middle classes in terms of their changing political
orientations.
3) Can one write a history of peasant politics through a history of caste? Or do you
think that class in a more useful concept in understanding the Indian peasantry?
Discuss in the context of the Indian national movement.
4) Write an essay on the emergence of low-caste identities such as the dalit and the
non-Brahmin in the first half of the 20th century.
5) Do you think that religion was relevant to the caste question in colonial India?
6) What was the relationship between gender politics and nationalist politics in
India?
7) Do you think that the working-classes in India acquired a distinct political identity
in the course of the nationalist movement?
8) Discuss the relationship between caste politics and gender politics in India, as it
evolved during the national movement.
9) What is the place of adivasis in the Indian imagination of modernity and

nationhood?
10) Would you agree that the Indian national movement was not one movement but
a set of different movements, which were in deep conflict with each other?
Discuss.
Objective questions
Question Number Type of question LOD
1 True or False 1
Question
69

Which of the following is false for Dwarakanath Tagore:
a) He was a Bengal zamindar
b) He was a great poet
c) He founded the Union Bank
d) He was a nationalist leader
Correct Answer /
b) and d)
Option(s)
Justification/ Feedback for the correct answer

b) and d): Dwarakanath Tagore was a zamindar-entrepreneur, not to be confused
with the later Tagores, many of whom were literary and artistic figures. He did
become a legendary figure of his times, because of his wealth and his ability to
undertake new kinds of commercial ventures like banking, which was uncommon
amongst landlords of his times and which was also not easy, given the many colonial
monopolies. However, he predated the rise of nationalism, and therefore cannot be
called nationalist at all.
Resource/Hints/Feedback for the wrong answer

a) and c): It is a common mistake to think of all important figures of colonial times
as implicitly or explicitly nationalist. Nationalists might have sometimes looked back
at Dwarkanath Tagore with Bengali of Indian pride, but that does not mean we count
his as part of the national pantheon of leaders.
Reviewer‟s Comment:
2 True or False 1
Question
Which of the following is false about the middle classes of colonial Bengal?
a) Many of them had landed interests.
b) Many of them became followers of the peasant mystic Sri Ramakrishna.
c) They vociferously supported the Bengal Tenancy laws of late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.
d) They campaigned against the tea-plantation labour system.
70

Correct Answer /
c)
Option(s)

c): The colonial state tried to give peasants occupancy-rights through these tenancy
laws. Since these rights often under-cut landlord privileges, many middle-class
Bengalis opposed these laws, because they came from small or big landlord families
in the countryside. They however were very vocal against the coolie system in tea-
plantations, because the tea-planters were almost all white men.

a), b) and d): Since the middle classes were very often self-conscious nationalists, it
would appear that they championed the interests of all sections of the nation,
including that of small peasants. But that was not always the case, because fighting
for peasant rights was often opposed to the class interest of the Bengali bhadrolok.
3 True or False 1
Question
Which of the following is false about the idea of „trusteeship‟?
a) It was formulated by Gandhiji.
b) It implied that the wealthy held their riches on behalf of and for the service of the
underprivileged.
c) It allowed business classes to become nationalist and yet stand against working-
class politics.
d) It was the official position of the Indian National Congress.
Correct Answer /
d)
Option(s)

d): The theory of trusteeship was indeed formulated by Gandhi so that business
classes and industrialists could be brought over to the side of nationalism and so
that there would not be violent conflict between Indian workers and Indian
capitalists. However, the all members of the Congress did not agree with Gandhi‟s
position, and thought in socialist terms about class struggle and labour politics.
71

a), b) and c): Because of Gandhi‟s great influence upon the Congress, it might
appear that Gandhi‟s principle would be the same as Congress principle. However,
the Congress itself was a fractured and heterogeneous organization, which included
communist and socialist elements too. Gandhi‟s position was however implicitly
accepted by more conservative Congressmen, such as Patel and Rajagopalachari.
4 True or False 1
Question
Which of the following is false about the Bombay Plan:
a) It was formulated in 1944.
b)It was formulated by socialists and communists.
c) It influenced the five-year plans of post-1947 India.
d) It was a principle about the formation of linguistic states.
Correct Answer /
b) and d)
Option(s)

b) and d): The Bombay Plan was formulated by industrialists and businessmen, and
was about the long-term economic development of India. It did influence the
Congress‟s planning committee and later India‟s planning ideas.

a) and c): After independence, many Bombay industrialists fought against linguistic
nationalism which stood for Marathi and against „outsider‟ dominance. The
industrialists argued that Bombay‟s financial primacy in the nation depended on so-
called outsiders, such as Parsis.
5 True or False 1
Question
72

Which of the following was not associated with the Self-Respect movement in Tamil
Nadu?
a) Kudi Arasu
b) Ambedkar
c) Periyar
d) Soviet socialism
Correct Answer /
b)
Option(s)

b): Ambedkar was not associated with the Tamil self-respect movement, which was
led by Periyar. Kudi Arasu was its weekly news organ. Periyar was also influenced
by Soviet socialism, he had traveled to Soviet Union and even called his own
principle samadharma or the equality principle.

a), c) and d): Ambedkar was indeed an all-India figure, but the Tamil non-Brahman
movement was not directly influenced by him.
6 True or False 1
Question
Which of the following was false about the Communal Award:
a) Ambedkar was happy with it.
b) It was about Hindu-Muslim accord
c) It was announced in 1919
d) Gandhi started a fast against it.
Correct Answer /
b) and c)
Option(s)
73

b) and c): The Communal Award was announced in 1932 and it gave dalits or
Depressed Classes a separate electorate.

a) and d): It was not about Hindu-Muslim electoral representation, though just as
Congress and Gandhi fought against separate electorates for Muslims, they fought
against separate electorates for dalits as well. This led to a strange collapsing of the
minority and the dalit issues in Congress perception. Ambedkar said that dalits
should have separate electorates so long as India did not get universal franchise.
7 True or False 1
Question
Which of the following is false about adivasi history in India?
a) Adivasi movements were about land rights.
b) Adivasi movements were about forest rights.
c) Adivasis were granted reservation with independence.
d) Adivasis were granted autonomous states with independence.
Correct Answer /
d)
Option(s)

d): Adivasis were granted autonomous states like Jharkhand, Chattisgarh as late as
in the 1990s, after many decades of struggle in post-1947 India. Nagaland was
created earlier, but the Naga demand for either nationhood or greater Nagaland
never materialized.

a), b) and c): The demand for autonomous states had emerged already before
independence, but the demand was not met, because the state felt that it would
jeopardize national integration. Instead STs, along with SCs, were offered
reservation by the new Indian constitution.
74

8 Match the following 2
Question
Match the following events with the correct dates:
a) Chauri Chaura i) 1936
b) Congress Agrarian Programme ii) 1922
c) Birth of Kisan Sabha iii) 1934
d) Birth of Congress Socialist Party iv) 1929
Correct Answer /
a) and ii), b) and i), c) and iv), d) and iii)
Option(s)

One must note that after the withdrawal of non-cooperation movement by Gandhi in
1922, because of peasant violence in Chauri Chaura, the peasant movement was
carried on by others such as Kisan Sabhas and the CSP, who were only tenuously
associated with the Congress. The Congress agreed to an Agrarian Programme much
later, when it came under great pressure from these peasant organizations.

The confusion in chronology can happen if we see peasant movements as simply a
Congress agenda led by Gandhi or his associates.
Question
Match the following authors with the name of their books on peasantry in colonial
India.
a) Ranajit Guha i) Coming of the Devi
b) David Hardiman ii) Peasant Pasts
c) Vinayak Chaturvedi iii) Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in India
75

d) James Scott iv) Weapons of the Weak
Correct Answer /
a) and iii), b) and i), c) and ii), d) and iv)
Option(s)
Question
Below are the images of four communists who were also part of the national
movement. Their names are E. M. S. Namboodiripad, Aruna Asaf Ali, P. C. Joshi and
M. N. Roy. Images are 1, 2, 3 and 4 from the top. Match the names with the
number.
76

77

Correct Answer / 1) M. N. Roy

Option(s) 2) P. C. Joshi
3) Aruna Asaf Ali
4) E. M. S. Namboodiripad
78

Question
Match the regions with the re-invented low-caste names:
a) Adi Dravidas i) Maharashtra
b) Ati Shudras ii) Punjab
c) Ravidasi-s iii) Tamil Nadu
d) Namashudras iv) Bengal
Correct Answer /
a) and iii), b) and i), c) and ii), d) and iv)
Option(s)
Question
Match the following author-names with text-names:
a) Ambedkar i) Social Change in Modern India
b) M. S. S. Pandian ii) Brahman and Non-Brahman
c) Eleanor Zelliot iii) From Untouchable to Dalit
d) M. N. Srinivas iv) Buddha and Karl Marx
Correct Answer /
a) and iv), b) and ii), c) and iii), d) and i)
79

Option(s)
Question
Match the following women‟s organizations with their correct founding date:
a) All India Women‟s Conference i) 1910
b) Bharat Stree Mahamandal ii) 1917
c) National Council for Women iii)1927
d) Women‟s India Association iv)1925
Correct Answer /
a) and iii), b) and i), c) and iv), d) and ii)
Option(s)
Question
80

Match the following names with the women‟s organizations:
a) Amrit Kaur i) Bharat Stree Mahamandal
b) Margaret Cousins ii) AIWC
c) Lakshmibai Kelkar iii) Women‟s India Association
d) Sarala Devi Chaudhurani iv) Rashtra Sevika Samiti
Correct Answer /
a) and ii), b) and iii), c) and iv), d) and i)
Option(s)
15 Multiple choice question 3
Question
The anti-caste text Gulamgiri was written by:
a) Jyotirao Phule
b) Ambedkar
c) Periyar
d) Premchand
Correct Answer /
a)
Option(s)
81

Question
The anti-caste text Annihilation of Caste was written by
a) M. N. Srinivas
b) Gandhi
c) Periyar
d) Ambedkar
Correct Answer /
d)
Option(s)
Question
The Justice Party was formed in:
a) Maharashtra
b) U.P.
c) Kerala
82

d) Tamil Nadu
Correct Answer /
d)
Option(s)
Question
The Child Marriage Restraint (Sarda) Act was passed in:
a) 1892
b) 1919
c) 1929
d) 1950
Correct Answer /
c)
Option(s)
83

Question
The Hindu Code Bills were passed in:
a) 1929
a)
b) 1937
b)
c) 1955-56
c)
d) 1947
Correct Answer /
c)
Option(s)

c): The reform of Hindu joint-family was being debated already by the 1930s, but it
took the form of laws only after independence and the passing of the constitution.
Question
Which of the following was not an Indian business interest?
a) textiles
b)chemicals
c) iron and steel
d) jute
Correct Answer /
d)
Option(s)

84

d): Textiles industry saw the rise of Parsis and Gujratis in India, iron and steel the
rise of Parsis such as the Tatas, chemicals was a sector in which swadeshi scientist-
entrepreneurs did many experiments. Jute however was almost wholly white-
owned.

a), b) and c): It is important to notice the complicated nature of Indian and colonial
capital. The iron and steel industry required heavy investment, and would appear to
be a sector that would draw investments from the West, because the West had both
technological and financial edge over Indians. But that was not the case, because
infrastructural investments brought long-term and slow returns, and did not attract
colonial capital, which remained far more interested in trade in jute and tea and the
immediate profits those brought in.
Question
The Telengana Movement happened in:
a) 1922
b) 1942
c) 1946
d) 1919
Correct Answer /
c)
Option(s)

c): The Telengana movement happened pretty late, in 1946, in Hyderabad state,
outside the influence of Congress and under influence of communists. By this time,
uprisings were occurring in various parts of the country autonomously – such as in
the Royal Navy etc – while the Congress remained mostly occupied in constitutional
negotiations.

a): 1922 was the date of Chauri Chaura.
b): 1942 was the year of Quit India.
d): In 1919 took place Gandhi‟s Kheda and Champaran satyagraha

85

Question
Which of the following faiths was not associated with adivasis during the nationalist
movement:
a) Hinduism
b) Islam
c) Christianity
d) Animism
Correct Answer /
b)
Option(s)

b): It is interesting that adivasis were never seen as Muslim in the nationalist
discourse – even though people like the Momins of Jharkhand shared some practices
with neighbouring adivasis and Afghans and others in the North West frontier could
be seen as tribes themselves. But nationalism pitched the tribal identity as a conflict
between „primitive animism‟, Hinduism and Christian conversion.

a), c) and d): The wrong answer will be to presume that there cannot be “Muslim”
tribes, just as it will be wrong to assume that there are no “Muslim” castes. The
point is to understand why in the terms of nationalism, all tribes were seen as either
fallen or converted Hindus.
Question
The Independent Labour Party was formed by:
a) The Indian National Congress
86

b) The communists
c) The Congress socialists
d) Ambedkar
Correct Answer /
d)
Option(s)

d): Ambedkar believed that the fight against capitalism and Brahminism must go
together, and he felt that the Congress was dominated by both upper-castes and
business interests. Hence his decision to start a new political party.

a), b) and c): Most working-class mobilizations were indeed by the communists, and
in this case too, Ambedkar was supported by many communists and socialists. It
might therefore appear as if this political party too was a communist formation.
Question
The All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) was formed in:
a) 1936
b) 1920
c) 1922
d) 1919
Correct Answer /
b)
Option(s)

There were massive working-class movements during the first world war (1914-
1918). In order to bring all these autonomous movements under the aegis of the
nationalist struggle, the Congress and Gandhi himself decided to start an umbrella
trade union congress, which was AITUC.
87


Many more unions got formed through the 1920s, so there is scope for the dates
getting mixed-up.
Question
The Girni Kamgar Union was formed in:
a) 1924
b) 1922
c) 1890
d) 1926
Correct Answer /
a)
Option(s)

This date is important because the Girni Kamgar Union was one of the most radical
and militant of working-class organizations. It was also a hub of communist
ideology.
88

Glossary
Adi Dravida: The name given to lower castes in Tamil Nadu, on the political assumption
that they were the original inhabitants of southern India, later colonized and renamed as
shudras by Aryan/Brahmin invaders from the north.
Adivasi: The name assumed by peoples hitherto known as tribes and aboriginals, such
as Santals, Mundas, Bhils etc, from approximately the 1930s. The political assumption
behind this was that adivasis were the original or true inhabitants of hill and forest lands
of India, who were later displaced by upper-caste outsiders, and therefore had the first
right to land in regions such as Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, north-east etc.
Atishudra: The name given to lower castes in Maharashtra by Jyotiba Phule, in order to
replace denigratory labels such as „untouchable‟.
Bahujan: The term signifying the majority or the masses, namely low-castes and
peasants, invented again by Jyotiba Phule in Maharashtra as a label for political
mobilization.
Dalit: The term used approximately from the 1930s for people hitherto known as
untouchables, signifying „crushed‟ or „broken‟ people. This became a positive political
name in place of the negative identity of the untouchable.
Depressed classes: The official administrative label given by the British colonial state
to low castes.
Gender (noun): Masculinity/femininity as socially and politically constructed, and not as
biologically determined characteristics.
Gender (verb, e.g. the gendering of society): The historically specific processes by
which a society or a nation produces and normalizes ideals of what it is to be a man or a
woman.
Indigenous people: A UN term for peoples who lived in continents such as Australia
and the Americas before invasion by white colonizers. The term became popular from
the 1980s in order to globally voice the demands for recognition and justice by
indigenous Australians and Amerindians, who had been oppressed, killed and displaced
by the white populations here.
Middle classes: A social group which emerged under colonialism through English
education and colonial employment. One says middle classes in the plural because it was
not quite a single income-group – and could include a small-time clerk as well as a very
affluent professional lawyer. Most of the Indian middle classes were upper or middle
castes. The middle-classes saw themselves as being at the forefront of modernity and
nationalism, though unlike the English bourgeoisie they were not a commercial or
industrial class, and distinguished themselves from traditional elites such as zamindars
and banias.
Non-Brahmins: A political bloc invented in early 20th century Tamil Nadu so as to
consolidate backward castes and dalits against north-Indian, Brahminical ideology.
Proletariat: A classical Marxist usage signifying industrial working classes, who were
meant to be the primary revolutionary force for the defeat of capitalism and the
emergence of socialism. In Indian languages, this term got variously translated as
mazdoor, sramik, kamgar etc.
89

Further readings
Ambedkar, B. R. 1937. in Janata, April 8, quoted by Guru, Gopal. 1993. Anchoring

Ambedkar in Liberalism. In Economic & Political Weekly Vol. 28 No. 38 Sep. 18, 1993,
1987-1988.
Amin, Shahid. 1995. Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922-1992. Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Arnold, David. 1986. Rebellious Hillmen: the Gudem-Rampa Risings 1839-1924. In

Ranajit Guha ed. Subaltern Studies. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 88-142.
Arunima, G. Friends and Lovers: Towards a Social History of Emotions in 19 th and 20th
century Kerala. 2005. In Bharati Ray ed. Women of India: Colonial and Postcolonial
Periods. Delhi: Sage.
Bandopadhyay, Sekhar. 2004. From Plassey to Partition: a History of Modern India.

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Nationalism and social group: interfaces

Nationalism and social groups: inferfaces

Language Editor: Swapna Liddle

Institute of lifelong learning, University of Delhi

Chapter 10: Nationalism and social groups: interfaces

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10.1: Landlords; professionals; business groups; middle

Why study the elite?

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Two, Indian nationalism initially emerged as an elite phenomenon, though anti-

Three, nationalism is itself a perpetual tussle between democratic and anti-democratic

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organization in India, was established by landlords in 1851. It became particularly active

Institute of lifelong learning, University of Delhi

Value addition: interesting detail

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Value addition: from the sources

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Institute of lifelong learning, University of Delhi

Value addition: did you know?

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Institute of lifelong learning, University of Delhi

The paradox of the peasant

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…[T]he meeting of these two domains of politics was marked by an unresolved

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Gandhi and the peasant

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But no less important were Gandhi‟s well-thought out political strategies of

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mass movements as violent, disorderly, uncontrolled uprisings by peasants and

Figure 10.2.1: Gandhi‟s famous image as a peasant leader at his charkha

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Figure 10.2.2: Gandhi, talking to peasants

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Figure 10.2.3: A statue of Alluri Sita Rama Raju in contemporary Andhra

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Socialists, communists and the peasant

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Figure 10.2.5: Sunil Janah, photograph, Bengal Famine, 1943

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Figure 10.2.6: Zainul Abedin, sketch, Bengal famine of 1943

Figure 10.2.7: E. M. S. Namboodiripad and P. Sundarayya at All India Kisan Sabha

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Figure 10.2.9: Sunil Janah, photograph, peasant march in Punjab

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Figure 10.2.10: Chittaprasad‟s wood-cut on the Tebhaga peasant struggle

Writing the peasant

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Both nationalist and Marxist historiographies encountered the peasantry as an

Value addition: interesting detail

Historians consequently have tried to make sense of this diversity by raising

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Chaturvedi, therefore, goes on to study the working of a public sphere and of

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Value addition: interesting detail

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Tribes and the national movement

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Even within communist movements, however, there emerged a mismatch between