Rahul Roushan
Author and Entrepreneur. Interested in Politics, History, and Tech.
In India, caste never left politics. It won’t leave in the foreseeable future either. Once in a while some blip appears to happen – say a Nitish Kumar winning Bihar, a Narendra Modi winning nationally, or even an Arvind Kejriwal winning Delhi – and people feel that a new era of politics could begin where some currency other than cash could get in circulation. But very soon, it’s the same old story again; caste gets back into circulation before any new idea even begins its flow.
Right now, caste is back to center-stage thanks to the debate around reservations and the SC-ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. What appeared limited to social media, now has started manifesting itself on the ground too.
A large crowd gathered at Jantar Mantar in August this year under the aegis of “Reservation Hatao Andolan” (movement to remove reservations), which was later rechristened as “Reservations Reforms Movement”. The other side is talking of taking the fight to the streets as well. Chandrashekhar ‘Ravan’ raked up the Poona Pact and announced a movement to not only save reservation but to expand it to the private sector.
The mood is polarized. One side is terming reservations akin to beggary, while the other side is calling it their “constitutional right” that has been granted to them by Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar.
But did you know that on the basis of the original Constitution that Ambedkar drafted, the Supreme Court of India gave a verdict declaring reservations unconstitutional? This happened in Ambedkar’s own lifetime, within months of the Constitution coming into force.
There was a fake video clip that went viral ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, which suggested that BJP would amend the constitution and remove reservations. Many feel this propaganda hurt BJP especially in the Lok Sabha seats falling in Uttar Pradesh. Ever since then, the pro-reservation crowd has been averring that they won’t allow any amendment to the constitution.
But did you know that if the Constitution had never been amended, there would have been no caste-based reservations in colleges and universities today?
And did you know that the law of reservation in India is older than the Constitution itself?
This article will tell you the story of reservations in India. How and where was the first policy of reservations in jobs and education introduced and implemented? What all factors led to this situation?
The article is an attempt to argue how we should look at this history, because often how we shape our future depends on how we see our past.
Often a smartass answer to ‘when did reservation begin’ is that ‘it began the day Brahmins reserved getting education and the job of priests for themselves’. The allusion is to the varna system.
First of all, the varna system was not a 100 percent reservation in education and employment for Brahmins. If you insist on reducing the varna system to mere reservation of jobs, it was a reservation for everyone not just Brahmins.
A very reductionist and simplistic definition of the varna system would be – a system where the nature of job and the role in the society for an individual was fixed at the time of their birth. What varna system originally was, and how it should be interpreted, is a vibrant debate in itself. I am not getting into that here, but that too deserves to be discussed with an open mind, separately.
The truth is that a birth-based employment system cannot run in today’s world, no matter how much anyone wants it to. We live in a time when even fixing gender at birth is called a regressive idea. Employment fixed at birth would not survive even five minutes in the modern world, rather the postmodern world. But this is not merely about any ideology. The way technology and commerce work now, a birth-based employment system will upset and imbalance many things.
But in ancient times, perhaps a birth-based system was the only way to keep things in order. I say this because in nearly all the civilisations contemporary to Vedic India- ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Spartan Greece, ancient China- there was a system of employment and social status that was based on birth.
Today that sounds like an assault on freedom, equality and dignity. But in an age with no industries as we know today and no economic system as evolved as today’s, societies everywhere chose a system that was birth based. It was probably the simplest way to give people a role and a livelihood. India was not any exception, where it was doing something particularly atrocious.
That is why, around 300 BCE, when Megasthenes came to India from Greece, he described the varna system without any shock value or outrage. Instead, he praised the country for not having a slave system. Do remember that slavery existed in almost every part of the world. The universal declaration of abolition of slavery is not even a hundred years old. Even a ‘modern’ faith like Islam speaks of some rights for slaves, but it does not speak of abolishing slavery altogether. On the other hand, Hindu tradition never institutionalized slavery as a religious good, though later narratives have worked hard to prove that the caste system was ‘worse than slavery’ – possibly exactly to neutralize this praise earned early by Hinduism.
I am not saying that everything was fine. From the medieval period onwards, one starts finding references to untouchability. However, tying all of that to religion alone is a very reductionist approach.
At this point of time someone can interject and ask what about Hindu religious texts treating some castes as high and some as low? An often cited ‘proof’ is the Purusha Sukta of the Rigveda, which says that the Brahmin was born from the mouth of Purusha and the Shudra from his feet. This is shown as proof of caste system not being merely hierarchical, but also derogatory where Shudras are equated with ‘dirty’ feet.
That is a bad reading of the Purusha Sukta. In the same Purusha Sukta, the very next verses say that Agni was born from the mouth of that Purusha and the Earth from his feet. Does that make Earth, whom we worship as Dharti Mata, lower in hierarchy than the fire? Does that make Mother Earth ‘untouchable’?
There are various others readings and misreadings from Hindu texts, all of which can be separately debated. We need to understand that we have been taught to read these things in one particular way, under the influence of one particular ideology. They need to be understood again, from scratch.
My own view is that varna, and the way it was practiced, kept evolving inside the Hindu society and inside the Dharmashastras too with passage of time. Compare the Ramayana and the Mahabharata — Treta and Dwapar yugas — and the treatment of varna and jati is already not the same. Ravana, despite his cruelty and deceit, is still recognized as a Brahmin, while in the Gita, Lord Krishna ties varna to guna (quality or nature) and karma (deeds). While answering the Yaksha Prashna, Yudhishthira says that being a Brahmin does not rest solely on birth. Later, in Kali yuga, Adi Shankaracharya accepts varna system as sanctioned by Dharmashastras and still bows to a Chandala and touches his feet. Different sampradayas read these episodes in their own way. I am pointing to this evolution and plurality of thoughts, not issuing a fatwa on any one reading.
That process of evolution appears to have to hit a pause button in the medieval period, I feel. We almost stay absent from the Industrial Revolution because, for us, the colonial period had already begun when we could have commenced our journey towards industrialization or ‘modernization’; our society started getting into the shell as we came under attack from invaders. Remember, invasions in India had started from the twelfth century itself. First came Muslim rulers from outside, then the British. Our own systems begin to crumple. That is why I say the process of evolution in the society hits a roadblock. But even then, in the medieval period, the Bhakti movement produced sects that either reinterpreted varna and jati or rejected the system altogether.
Essentially, what I am arguing is that the Hindu society was not frozen for all time inside one rigid form of varna system. Nor was everything in society decided on the basis of one Dharmashastra — not even Manusmriti, whose name is taken the most often.
Times changed, languages changed, beliefs took new shapes, means of trade and commerce changed fast, technology changed faster, new occupations appeared, new jatis were formed, and new laws were written, and the State changed its nature. In all this churn, some communities pulled ahead, and some were hit by time. Caste inequality did arise, but pinning the whole of it on religion alone is not fair, because the same story of some groups racing ahead and some falling behind is seen in other parts of the world too.
The world in medieval times was going through a massive churn. Colonialism and slavery produced conditions that wouldn’t be called anything other than criminal injustice and inhuman inequality today. Perhaps it’s a little tough to realise that all the modern liberal ideas we now treat as our default setting and part of common sense are, at best, 150–200 years old in practice.
The United States of America is held up as the most modern country on earth. It’s almost hard to imagine that women there could not vote till 1920, that is just around a century ago. The Democratic Party, which today is associated with liberalism and woke politics, was, about 150 years ago, on the side of defending slavery. And just fifty years ago, the Western world treated homosexuality as a mental illness — not only in society, but in science. Those societies were not running on varna or on Hindu shastras. Their thinking was still that ‘backward’. It was a feature, not bug, of medieval times.
However, back in India, every instance of any injustice or inequality – from a modern and liberal point of view – is immediately blamed on the varna-jati system, and then the entire blame lands at the doorsteps of Brahmins, who are accused of creating and sustaining this system.
The reservation policy in India has its origin in this very anti-Brahmin sentiment, and especially in the belief that Brahmins had captured every important job in the society.
The anti-Brahmin sentiments and rhetoric got its sharpest and earliest support from Jyotirao Govindrao Phule, who was active in the second half of the nineteenth century. By then the British were ruling the whole of India. Bengal and its neighborhood had already seen about a hundred years of British rule after the Battle of Plassey, while Maharashtra – where Phule was active – had seen about sixty years of English rule following the defeat of Marathas in the third Anglo-Maratha war. Essentially, the British had completely changed entire India by then.
Phule was, in those times, a wealthy contractor, builder and a flower merchant. He also held agricultural land and later could run a publishing business too. He had good relations with the colonial government and supplied material for several infrastructure projects around Poona. But he felt that despite being educated and well-off, the Brahmins treated him as inferior. Thus, he began writing against Brahmins – in a very acerbic manner – and became a ‘social reformer’. Our textbooks now call him Mahatma Phule.
In 1882, he appeared before an Education Commission the British had set up — the Hunter Commission — and complained that Brahmins had monopolized almost every high office. He told the Commission that the Brahmin monopoly was not limited only to jobs, but even in schools and colleges there was a Brahmin monopoly.
His claim was that nearly every teacher in the government or government-aided schools was a Brahmin; that these teachers did not teach children of other castes properly; and that they filled those children with a sense of inferiority. He blamed this attitude of Brahmins as the sole reason why other castes were neither getting educated nor getting good jobs. Interestingly, he also said that teachers’ salaries were very low — but the Brahmins had still cornered those jobs.
His argument was that if the British educated the Shudras instead of the Brahmins, and put them in important jobs, those communities would remain loyal to the Raj. In other words: break the Brahmin monopoly, and a large population will not demand any freedom from any foreign rule – something that would be in the British interest only.
In order to achieve the above, he proposed some solutions — raise teachers’ salaries, appoint non-Brahmin teachers, and recruit non-Brahmins officials, especially to higher posts with executive powers.
This is effectively a demand of reservation in education and jobs. However, Phule did not use the word ‘reservation’ per se. But these are the ideas and speeches that later give birth to the first official reservation policy in India.
One can wonder how much of what Phule said was true? To prove any kind of Brahmin monopoly, Phule cited no numbers. His case rested entirely on lived experience — what he had seen and felt. His other writings are even more caustic and target the beliefs and ways of Brahmins. One can argue that objectivity was not his strongest feature. Today if you paint an entire community selfish, insensitive and cunning, it would be counted as hate speech; people would say this is what Hitler said about the Jews.
I would not make that comment about Phule or his writings here. While discussing the varna-jati system, I have already argued that applying modern standards to judge events of the past is unfair. But if you are going to take a system from thousands of years ago, judge it by modern standards and convict it as injustice, you should not flinch if someone applies the same test to a statement made 150 years ago and calls it hate speech or a Nazi mentality.
While Phule gave no data to prove any Brahmin monopoly, we do find some data in a book named The Emergence of Indian Nationalism, published by the Cambridge University Press in 1968. This book lists the share of various castes and communities in educational institutions and government jobs in British India.
Before we look into this data, it’s important to keep in mind that the top executive and judicial posts, such as judges, collectors, police chiefs, etc., were mostly held by white officers. The data in this book pertains to those posts that the British had left for Indians to be appointed to, partly so that a larger revolt against their government would not take place.
The numbers from those times, as documented in the aforementioned book, do show Brahmin dominance, especially in the Bombay and Madras Presidencies.
For example, in Bombay Presidency in 1886, of the judicial and executive posts the Raj had left for Indians, Brahmins held 211 out of 328.
In the field of education, let us look at 1875 numbers for the same presidency. About 66 percent of college students were Brahmins, though in the primary and middle schools the dominance is weaker.
So, the claim of Phule that Brahmins dominated jobs and education, indeed reflects in the data too.
However, the same book also shows that Brahmins were not dominating everywhere. In Bengal, Kayasthas were ahead of Brahmins in education and employment. In Malabar (Kerala) and in Gujarat, educational levels among Brahmins were lower than elsewhere. And when it came to trade and commerce, Brahmins lagged behind other communities in most places.
But does a dataset that shows that Brahmins were, to a large extent, ahead of other communities in sectors like education and government employment, necessarily prove that there was some active collusion or conspiracy by Brahmins to keep other castes backward? Such things can’t be merely known by looking at a table or reading data; one has to undertake analysis of data to arrive at any conclusion. This analysis has to be done via comparing and contrasting the data found in the aforementioned book with another set of data found in another book titled The Beautiful Tree by Dharampal.
Dharampal was a Gandhian writer and thinker. I mention his ideology specifically so that no one can dismiss the book as ‘Sanghi literature’. He spent years collecting and studying surveys, collector reports, district returns and other government papers of the British officials that documented the state of affairs when the British came to India. On that basis he showed that education in India was not the monopoly of one caste or varna.
In the indigenous schools across almost every part of India, children of all castes, including jatis belonging to the Shudra varna, studied together. In nearly all these schools, students from non-Brahmin castes were found to be in a majority. No Brahmin monopoly is reflected in the data captured by this book.
For example, in the schools of Madurai district in the Madras Presidency, non-Brahmin students formed over 91 percent of student population. This was not limited just to one district. If one took data across all the Tamil schools in the Madras Presidency, the non-Brahmin share was over 87 percent.
Dharampal’s book has figures from the Bengal Presidency too, and there is no Brahmin monopoly there either. There are figures from the Punjab region as well in the book, and the picture is the same – Brahmins didn’t have monopoly or exclusive rights over education. And all of this supporting data comes from British documents.
Yes, study of Vedas was a Brahmin preserve in many places. But education is not only studying the Vedas — especially by the medieval period, when society, trade and technology had already moved far from the ancient world. Mathematics, literature, philosophy, the arts, science – to whatever extent it had evolved – and vocational learning — there was no caste bar on studying any of these. Children of all castes went to these indigenous schools to study such subjects.
The Beautiful Tree shows that even students from the Chandala caste were present in such schools. Not only students, many teachers came from Chandala caste as well. Remember that in many descriptions the Chandala is placed even below Shudras, as untouchables.
If someone still wants to call this a 100 percent reservation in education for Brahmins, either the arithmetic is wrong or the intent is.
You may now ask: the Cambridge University Press book shows Brahmin dominance in institutions, while the Dharampal book shows the opposite: which one do we trust?
There is no contradiction between the two books, because there is a gap of about fifty years between the two pictures presented by the two books. The numbers in the Cambridge University Press book describe the scenario in the schools and colleges run by the British, while the numbers in Dharampal’s book describe the scenario in India’s indigenous institutions before the British system had started showing its impact. These educational institutions included gurukuls and the small schools of towns and villages. After the English system arrived, those institutions either shut down or were pushed to the margins.
Dharampal explains why this happened. The colonial government centralised almost everything. Local economies collapsed. Villages had to pay lagaan and other taxes and were left with virtually nothing to spend on anything else. The support system that kept those schools alive disappeared.
Dharampal’s book is available online for download, for free, legally. Search for ‘the beautiful tree book download’ and you will find several links. Amusingly, the third Google result is the BJP’s e-library.
A Gandhian’s book sits on a BJP website, but is missing from the Congress one.
Anyway. Back to Phule.
A question follows. Did Phule not know that before the British arrived there was no Brahmin monopoly in schools? Should the attack not have been on the colonial education system that collapsed the non-Brahmin participation in education, rather than on varna system? Guessing his motives takes us out of history and into politics, which is a risky jump, so we would stick to what is documented in history.
In his testimony to the Hunter Commission, Phule also talks about those indigenous schools — the ones Dharampal writes about — which by then were in a bad shape. He himself says that nothing serious is taught there, and that the teachers in such schools came from the most down-and-out among the Brahmins. Government aid to such schools, he says, is a waste.
Yet again, Phule blamed Brahmins for such schools not doing well, even though Dharampal shows, using British documents itself, that those schools were doing just fine before being wrecked by the British rule that followed. Fifty years is a long time. It is long enough to destroy a system.
Before we move forward, I would like to summarize my thoughts here:
In the ancient period, or in Vedic India, varna system is born and it evolves as the yugas change. The varna-jati system can be loosely and crudely be termed as a birth-linked occupational order. By today’s standards it looks like inequality and injustice. But in those times, civilizations outside India too had birth-based systems that were similar, if not harsher.
By the medieval period, there are many views on varna, but jati identity becomes strong. That is not some uniquely Indian pathology. Tribalism is a human instinct. People like groups; they also need them.
But medieval times change many things in the society. Not only do politics and administration change, but technology and commerce change too. The world witnesses the industrial revolution and colonialism. In these tumultuous times, some jatis benefit from the changes while some suffer. Those who benefit try to hold that advantage, which leads to a sense of inequality and injustice among others.
Please remember that how groups of people treat one another depends far more on the law of the day: who writes the rules, who holds the gun, and who runs the market — than on some text written a thousand years earlier.
Even now, a government can take two groups and turn them into enemies with a small policy change. I am not talking about reservations. Take taxi operators. Introduce one favorable rule for app-based taxis like Ola, Uber or Rapido and the private taxi operators will claim that injustice is being meted out to them. Give it a little time, and both sides will be ready to smash windscreens and even heads of each other. This has actually happened too in some places.
The British exploited this human nature with great skill. We call it the “Divide and Rule policy”. In our textbooks, divide and rule is almost always mentioned in context of Hindus and Muslims being pitted against each other, allegedly by the British. However, the more potent divide and rule was executed inside the Hindu society.
British used the Aryan Invasion Theory to divide North and South. ‘Reform’ of gurdwaras was used to divide Hindus and Sikhs. And ‘social and administrative reforms’ were used to divide Hindu jatis.
I am not giving the upper castes, and Brahmins in particular, a clean chit. In the colonial period they did things that planted a sense of injustice in other communities. We will come to that as well.
The reason for recounting this short chronology is simple. The Brahmin monopoly Phule saw, and the arrogance he read into Brahmin behavior, was in my view far more a product of British policy than of anything else.
That policy was this: wreck India’s indigenous system, and put an English one in its place. The effects were catastrophic for castes that today are known as ‘backward castes’ and ‘scheduled castes’. The numbers themselves show how non-Brahmin students were in majority in indigenous Indian schools, but Brahmins end up being in dominant numbers in the schools and colleges opened and run by the British.
The tragedy is that even after this fact backed by data, you will find people talking about ‘Dalit rights’ who would claim that it was the British who first gave ‘lower castes’ the right to education. That is a lie. The record shows that the truth is just the opposite.
You must have heard of Thomas Babington Macaulay. He is the father of the colonial education policy in India. He had conceitedly declared that a single shelf of a good European library was worth more than the whole of Indian literature and knowledge.
In his Minute of 1835, he had laid out what he wanted to achieve in India by replacing the indigenous schools with British schools and colleges. The aim of English education, he said, should be to create a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. He also recommended that the government give no aid to indigenous schools and concentrate only on building new schools and colleges.
If one was not convinced by comparing the data of two books earlier, at least they should have no doubt after reading what Macaulay said. He was clear that the old system had to be demolished. And that’s what English education did – it destroyed an indigenous system in which, in practice, all castes had the right and avenue to study and learn. The student share in the schools fairly represented their population share in the society i.e. castes were adequately represented in proportion of their population.
And then the same British started indulging narratives that were about under-representation of certain castes or monopoly of Brahmins. Unparalleled duplicity, which is hardly much talked about.
The schools and colleges British built to entrench their system were few, and they were located in the big towns and cities. To justify this approach, they floated something called the Downward Filtration Theory: you help develop an elite class by giving them exclusive education, and the rest of the society will be pulled up by these elites. This justification was total bunkum. Macaulay had already declared that he wanted to develop an elite class that would essentially be brown sahibs – closer to the English culture and system than to their own motherland. These brown sahibs were trained to look down on the rest, not to feel enthused to uplift them.
Thanks to the new education system put in place by the British, the English schools were not within reach of most people, while the indigenous schools were dying. This effectively excluded a large number of Indians from modern education, especially those belonging to non-Brahmin castes.
Brahmins were less affected by this policy change brought by the Englishmen, because in the changed medieval and early-modern economy, many Brahmin families had already started moving to towns. They did not have much owned land in villages to live off, so it was easier for them to migrate to new places. The British were coincidentally opening their schools and colleges in big towns and cities only, so for Brahmins, it became easier to obtain English education.
To understand the British stratagem and duplicity, let us take the example of Calcutta Sanskrit College, which the British set up in 1824. Admission to this college was restricted to Brahmins and Vaids, on the claim that only Brahmins study Sanskrit. That was a false claim. People of any caste could study Sanskrit. Yes, not all castes could study the Vedas in Sanskrit, but Hindu society had been debating that too. But that couldn’t have been extended to claim that only Brahmins had the right to study Sanskrit.
Some Brahmins supported this rule of admission restricted by caste, which would have led to resentment among other castes and creating divisions in the Hindu society. I am mentioning this because a certain breed of ‘Dalit intellectuals’ never tires of saying that the British brought all social reforms in India and uplifted the lower castes. If the British had meant to give lower castes an equal status or equal rights, they would not have written such admission rules, and they would not have backed any Brahmin faction’s demand to keep others out.
The man who changed this admission rule was not a British officer. It was Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, a Brahmin. Some British officers incidentally opposed him when he wanted other castes admitted to Calcutta Sanskrit College. That is divide and rule in one building.
Within a few decades, the gap between castes in modern education — and in the new administrative jobs that required being trained in this education only — became wider than anything the earlier indigenous system had produced. And then the demand for representation, for reservation, begins.
Jyotirao Phule first put this demand in 1882, without using the word ‘reservation’, but he succeeded in making Brahmins the principal villain about this inequality in education and employment. About twenty years later, influenced by those ideas, reservation became the official policy in one part of India.
That happened in 1902, in the princely state of Kolhapur.
On paper, the princely states had their own kings, but the control sat with the British. They could overrule a king, or even replace him. Kings had to get many of their decisions ‘approved’ by the British officers.
On 26 July 1902, Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj, the ruler of the princely state of Kolhapur, issued an order reserving 50 percent of government jobs and places in educational institutions for the backward castes. Almost every community except Brahmins, Kayasthas and Parsis was brought inside the net of reservations. While Kayasthas and Parsis were kept out with the Brahmins, the target of the policy was the Brahmins primarily. Shahu’s resentment against them was already public by then.
There is a little backstory. Two or three years earlier, Shahu of Kolhapur had gone to the Panchganga river for the Kartik snaan. The palace priest was to chant mantras during the bath. Mantras were chanted too. But another Brahmin who accompanied Shahu noticed that the palace priest was chanting Puranic mantras, not Vedic ones. When an explanation was demanded, the Rajopadhye — the chief palace priest — said he did not consider Shahu a Kshatriya. Instead, he considered Shahu a Shudra, and Vedic mantras could not be recited for a Shudra.
The argument behind taking such a position was that by the twentieth century the varna system had deformed so badly that only two varnas were left — Brahmin and Shudra. Therefore, Shahu was a Shudra. This episode is known as the Vedokta controversy.
For Shahu, this was a public humiliation. Incensed, he ordered that all palace rites would now use Vedic mantras. But Rajopadhye refused. The standoff lasted nearly two years. Bal Gangadhar Tilak, a towering leader of the Congress party, backed Rajopadhye’s reasoning, though the Congress as a party stayed out of the mess.
In May 1902 Shahu removed Rajopadhye from his post and took back the land around the temple that had been given to him. Rajopadhye appealed to British officials. The appeal was rejected. The same British, who had been on the side maintain exclusivity of Brahmins in the Calcutta Sanskrit College admission case, were now acting as social reformers hitting at privileges of Brahmins.
You may ask why Rajopadhye had to get into this confrontation? If he himself believed that varna system had changed so much, then why get stuck on who is a Shudra debate? After all, the man who first objected to the non-Vedic mantras was also a Brahmin and a priest, so there was no unanimity among Brahmins about this view. Honestly, I find it a tragedy and unnecessary provocation, but I have already said twice earlier that we should avoid applying modern standards to give a moral judgement to events from centuries ago, so I will let it pass for now.
It won’t be wrong to say that the Vedokta controversy gave caste conflict in India a new direction. Within two months of removing the Rajopadhye, Shahu announced the reservation policy. The British approved it, though they did not announce similar reservation policies in other parts of the country where they were directly ruling.
Meanwhile Shahu did not stop at quotas. He later gave full support to the Satyashodhak Samaj that Phule had founded. In 1921, he supported B.R. Ambedkar in starting the journal Mooknayak. Both these decisions strengthened anti-Brahmin rhetoric and literature.
It should be mentioned here that stories of conflict between Marathas and Brahmins were already finding audience in Maharashtra even before the Vedokta controversy. At the center of this anti-Brahmin sentiment was belief of a section of Marathas, who believed that Peshwas – Brahmin Prime Ministers in Maratha empire – usurped power from the Marathas. After Shahu’s direct patronage, anti-Brahmin rhetoric started gaining currency at a much wider level.
In fact, similar sentiments began to strengthen in the neighborhood as well. In 1916, the Justice Party was formed in Madras, and its tirade against Brahmins sounded a lot like Phule and Shahu. The Princely state of Mysore too witnessed similar resentment against monopoly of Brahmins.
How far Shahu had travelled in his angst against Brahmins can be gauged from a letter he wrote in 1918 to Lord Sydenham, a former Governor of Bombay. Shahu wrote that it was not kings like him or even the British government, who really ruled India. The real rulers of India were Brahmins, he wrote, because they had captured every job. The letter is one long complaint that a minority community had monopolized every field, including trade, and that the only way to stop this was – reservation.
For some reasons, leaders like Phule and Shahu believed that the British would bring policies to bring down the Brahmin and lift Shudras. But what those policies were actually doing, we have already seen. The education policy had the opposite effect – it actually pulled down the Shudras and lifted Brahmins. And same was the story with almost every policy introduced by the British. Let us look at another example – the Criminal Tribes Act.
In 1871, the British passed the Criminal Tribes Act. By then they had the whole country under their control, and they had already rewired the education system and installed a new administrative system. Under this Act, several Hindu castes and tribal groups were declared criminals by birth. People from these communities had to mark attendance at the police station every day. When a child was born, or someone was married into the family, their names had to be added at the nearest police station.
If a theft or any other crime took place in the area, the police picked people from these caste groups and beat them up to extract confession. The government even had the power to take their children away and put them in juvenile homes, whether the family had done anything or not.
The communities that took this blow are today almost all in the SC, ST or OBC lists — Nat, Bawariya, Madari, Khatik, Pasi, Dom, Mehtar, Valmiki, and many others. Their lives were made into a living hell.
Even in the current times, almost unthinkingly, we attach words like thief, dacoit or thug when referring to some caste groups – the root lies in this Act. It trained the tongue. Remember we used to call fraudsters ‘420’ because that was the IPC section for fraud. Lexicon develops like that only. Today, if someone casually ties the word thief to a caste name, he would be accused of doing it under the influence of Brahminism and Manuvaad. No one even remotely remembers this original sin by the British.
The British government first applied the Act in western regions like Punjab and Rajasthan. Within five or six years, it was extended to regions that are currently known as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Bengal and Odisha, and by 1924, the Act was applicable to the whole of India.
Through all of this, they kept talking to Phule and Shahu as if they alone were the messiahs of the lower castes. Brahmins had not asked for Criminal Tribes Act, it was purely a colonial invention. But despite that, there is an army of ‘Dalit thinkers’ who aver that the British were saving lower castes from Brahmin oppression.
Another question arises. Why did Phule, Shahu, and later Ambedkar not attack the Criminal Tribes Act or such policies of the British with the same energy they reserved for the Brahmins? The Congress did oppose it — the same Congress they called a ‘Brahmin party’. Was it because their regions, and later their own castes, were outside the purview of the Act? But again, I won’t be making any judgements here.
Before moving on, one more thing. It was not only the education system or laws like the Criminal Tribes Act, almost every colonial policy widened inequality among castes. Communities like the Nishads and the Meenas had their own kingdoms and kings. By Independence, they became poor and powerless and were relegated to Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe status. The Chamar community had wealth as well as exclusive rights over leather trade, but they too sank into poverty and were branded criminals as the British rule started changing things in India. I will recommend watching these two well-researched videos by Upword, which tell the story of fall of Nishad and Meenas, and also about the tragedy of the Chamar community.
I will say it again; I am not giving upper castes a clean chit. But the story of caste inequality is not black and white.
Back to the story of reservation. After Shahu’s 1918 letter calling reservation the only solution, the British did not roll out caste quotas across India, nor they start packing collector and judge posts with non-Brahmins. They were not in the social reform business. They were in the business of keeping people fighting with each other so that they together don’t fight the British. And castes did fight. After Kolhapur, demand for reservations grew in other parts of the country too.
In 1918, the demand for reservation rises in another princely state, and this time too a king notifies and implements the policy. It was the princely state of Mysore and king was Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV.
However, Krishnaraja of Mysore was not acting after any personal humiliation as was the case with Shahu of Kolhapur. Anti-Brahmin politics in neighboring Maharashtra and Madras had reached Mysore. In Mysore, a Kannada speaking region, there was additional element of resentment against Tamil speaking elites, who again happened to be Brahmins most of the time. Influenced by regional and caste equations, non-Brahmin leaders wanted representation in higher posts in Mysore. The king accepted the demand. In 1918, he set up a committee chaired by a British judge, with members from all castes. The committee recommended reservation for non-Brahmins, which Krishnaraja Wadiyar implemented in 1921.
As in Kolhapur, in Mysore too, a 50% quota was introduced in jobs and educational institutes. Additionally, a new form of reservation came in this time: 50 percent of rooms too in government hostels were reserved for non-Brahmin students. The hostel-and-library quota you get outraged about in the news today? That policy is a hundred years old.
Though he too implemented reservations policy, Krishnaraja Wadiyar did not go on to patronize anti-Brahmin ideology on a wide scale the way Shahu did. He had personal faith in Hindu dharma and he respected Brahmins. Essentially, he accepted that some communities had fallen behind and needed help, but he did not dump the entire blame on Brahmins. That is probably why his name is not taken in the same breath as Phule, Shahu and Ambedkar.
The name that is taken with those three is Periyar — E.V. Ramasamy of Tamil Nadu — because he went a step ahead in his hatred for Brahmins and declared the entire Brahmin community foreign invaders. He used the Aryan Invasion Theory the British had supplied, and built a large anti-Brahmin campaign in Tamil Nadu. The grievance was the same – Brahmin monopoly in schools, colleges and jobs.
Like Phule, Ramasamy was a successful businessman and owned land. He began his political career in the Congress and later became the most recognizable face of anti-Brahmin politics in the South. After Kolhapur in 1902 and Mysore in 1921, reservation arrived in what was then the Madras Presidency, where Ramasamy was active, but he had no role in getting that reservation policy implemented. It happened because Congress decided to sit out of the provincial elections.
In 1920, Mahatma Gandhi launched the Non-Cooperation Movement after Jallianwala Bagh massacre. As part of it, the Congress boycotted provincial elections across the country. Subsequently, the Justice Party won the elections and formed the government in the Madras Presidency. As recounted earlier, Justice Party was an anti-Brahmin party. Its leaders were men of land and influence, much like Phule.
The year after it took office, in 1921, Justice Party government notified reservation in the Madras Presidency. In 1922 it was tightened further. Kolhapur had reserved jobs and educational institutions. Mysore had added hostel rooms. Madras brought reservation into promotions.
Ramasamy was still in the Congress at that time. He wanted the Congress party to accept the policy. But Congress thought it was bad for national unity. In 1925, Ramasamy left Congress and joined the Justice Party, though that did not make the Justice Party stronger. It lost the 1926 election.
The reservation policy, however, once in, did not leave with the government. Congress later won in Madras Presidency and formed the government, but it kept the quotas going as a government policy.
Does this sound familiar? The things opponents of reservations now greet with shock or despair were already in place since the British period itself – reservation in jobs, in educational institutes, in hostels, in promotions, and a policy that no government was willing to change. We would soon see that even the current policy of lower examination fees for certain castes was also formulated during the British times only. We will soon know when.
I hope you noticed one thing: wherever reservation was implemented — Kolhapur, Mysore, and Madras — it was done either by an Indian king or by a local government run by Indians. The British were not willing to announce a caste quota for Shudras or backward classes on their own, either in any presidencies or at the union level. It is not so that they were not toying with the idea of reservations at all; they did actually implement it at union level, but not for the Hindu castes.
In 1925 the central British government issued a guideline – there should be preferential hiring in administrative posts, especially for the ICS posts, today’s IAS – based on the community of the candidates. But the intended beneficiaries of this ‘almost reservation’ policy were not Shudras or the backward castes. It was only for Muslims.
Around this time Ambedkar was building his identity as a leader of Shudras and increasing his relationship with the British, hoping to extract for Shudras what Muslims were already getting. The British, however, were not willing to give any reservation at union level despite such policies in effect in Kolhapur, Mysore and Madras.
The Simon Commission came to India in 1928. Congress boycotted it, but Ambedkar met the Commission. In 1930, the British called the Round Table Conference. Congress boycotted that too, but Ambedkar attended it. These events brought him to close attention of the British, who saw him far more collaborative than the Congress party, which was increasingly pushing for self-governance.
By 1932, the British started treating BR Ambedkar as the sole representative and leader of the Scheduled Castes. In the same year, separate electorates for the Scheduled Castes were announced by the British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. This is also known as “Communal Award” where different communities could send their own leaders to the assembly, without bothering about collaborating with other communities to garner their votes. It effectively encouraged different communities to pursue more and more exclusivist agenda for their own benefit, rather than working on some common minimum program that could benefit all.
Mahatma Gandhi opposed the Separate Electorates for the Scheduled Castes because this could have brought Hindu castes at a war path with each other. On 24 September 1932, the Poona Pact was signed between Gandhi and Ambedkar. Under this pact, some legislative seats were reserved for Scheduled Castes though the electors’ pool was kept common instead of being divided into separate electorates.
This in a way was the first reservation for the Scheduled Castes at the union level, though in the legislature. There was no central reservation in jobs or educational institutions, yet. British didn’t announce any award to that effect. Remember, Gandhi’s objection was to separate electorates, not to reservation policy for the Scheduled Castes. On the issue of job reservation, the British themselves were resisting it.
Seven years after the preferential-hiring guideline, in 1934, the British finally introduced a fixed-percentage reservation for various communities while hiring candidates on top administrative posts. Muslims got 25 percent reservation. Anglo-Indians, Christians, Parsis and Sikhs together got 8.33 percent. Scheduled Castes got nothing.
You may have noticed that while mentioning the events of 1932 or thereafter, I have been using the term Scheduled Castes (SCs) instead of ‘Shudras’. By then this term (SCs) had become an official term. The 1931 Census, undertaken by the British government of course, was heavily focused on caste. Many people still treat 1931 as the last “caste census”. While categorising castes in that census, the British first used the term ‘Depressed Classes’ and then ‘Scheduled Castes’. They used a term that indicated backwardness or a status where they deserved some attention, but they kept refusing reservations.
The reason to refuse the reservation was cited by them as the findings reflected in the same census. Education among Scheduled Castes was so low, the British said, that even with reservation they would not find qualified candidates. So what was the use of announcing a fixed quota?
Think about it. The British install an education system and an administrative structure that leaves some castes behind, then they cite that backwardness – arising out of systems set in place by them – to deny reservations to those who had fallen behind. Yet, it is the Brahmins who get blamed for this entire tragedy.
You may have wondered why the anti-Brahmin politics and the demand for reservations first exploded in Maharashtra and then other regions of the South India, but seemingly not in the northern parts of the country. Ambedkar raised the demand for reservations at the Centre, but he did not get any massive support or mass following outside Maharashtra. Were Bengal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan free of any Brahmin monopoly in colleges and offices?
There are two reasons for this. First, the anti-Brahmin wave in Maharashtra and the South was not led by poor or ‘untouchable’ leaders. These men had more money and land than an average Brahmin. Their grouse was that even after having land and wealth, Brahmins would not treat them as equals or with respect.
It angered them that Brahmins sitting in high government posts decided the fate of their contracts and appeals. “If we have the land and the money, why is the power with Brahmins?” – that was often the grievance at the root. Social justice and the persecution of Shudras was the narrative woven around it later to give an intellectual and ideological cover to that grievance of some leaders of the landed castes. It should not surprise anyone that in a place like Tamil Nadu, which has seen high percentage of reservations and intense anti-Brahmin political rhetoric, the real benefit of reservations has gone to the intermediate castes, not to the Scheduled Castes.
There is historical context to this grievance too. After the British destroyed the indigenous systems and built their own, these landed communities fell behind in acquiring the English education even while they still acquired land and other assets. As we’ve seen earlier, the Brahmins benefited as many of them had migrated to bigger towns and cities – where the new schools and colleges were being set up by the British – for they didn’t have much land or assets back in villages that could have made them stay back.
North India did not have the same kind of caste arithmetic where Brahmins disproportionately benefitted from the new system. Yadavs, Kurmis, Jats, etc. could have run a similar argument as the landed castes in South India, but they did not see the kind of Brahmin monopoly visible in the South. Kayasthas, Banias and Khatris were also in higher posts. And there was another community with which almost everyone had a grievance — the Muslims, who were being appeased by the British.
Furthermore, Muslim leaders like Sir Syed were hardening a sense of superiority and separatism among common Muslims. Communal riots were becoming common as the Pakistan movement gained strength. Not to forget that the memory of Islamic rule and atrocities on Hindus meted out in those times was still fresh among the Hindu castes. For an ordinary Hindu, there was no solid reason to treat the Brahmin as the principal enemy.
Apart from these factors, from Punjab to Bengal, there were ‘reform movements’ that did not make the Brahmin as big a villain in the society like Phule or Periyar did. Movements like Arya Samaj, Brahmo Samaj, Ramakrishna Mission, etc. also spoke out against inequality in varna-jati system or other ‘impurities’ as they saw it, but they did not make it all about fighting and destroying the Brahmins.
And much earlier than these ‘reform movements’, north India had seen the Ramanandis weaken the caste divide by using the force of bhakti. Bhakti movement put spiritualism and religiosity above caste identity. So even where anti-Brahmin feeling existed in some sections, it did not translate into an ideology that required wiping out everything associated with Brahmins; because that would have wiped out dharma and bhakti too.
Such sentiments and ideologies based on those were deliberately manufactured in the North much later, in the 1970s and 1980s, and the project is still running. Today, some self-appointed activists among Yadavs, Kurmis and Jats are using the same toolkit that the South used a hundred years ago. They believe reservation can be justified only through that kind of anti-Brahmin narrative.
That narrative suited the British. Every inequality in society could be dumped on Brahmins, even though the operating system of the country had been a colonial one for more than a hundred years.
Please do remember that from about 1818, the British already controlled most of India. In most regions the East India Company ran the government — courts, collectors, army, and police force. After 1857, the Crown took direct control. By then, the education system, legal system, economic system, and the administrative structure had entirely been changed to suit the British taste and interests.
Whatever came with that change — electricity, roads, railways, bridges, banks, hospitals, dams — the British took the credit for. But whatever poverty and inequality grew in the same period due to these systems, the Brahmins were blamed for.
Imagine, today a Narendra Modi or a Jawaharlal Nehru can be blamed for all social ills during their regime – and some of these criticisms are valid too – but somehow the ‘Dalit thinkers’ can’t blame the British for whatever happened during their regime, even though that regime was far stronger and more disruptive than any modern democratic regime can be.
No wonder that while the British refused to give Scheduled Castes a fixed quota in jobs despite ruling for over 100 years, they extended every help to develop an atrocity literature in which Brahmins had denied Shudras water for 5,000 years. Who doesn’t want the albatross hung around other’s neck?
By 1934, Phule and Shahu had breathed their last. Ambedkar and Periyar were carrying the ideology forward. When the British refused Scheduled Castes a fixed percentage in central jobs in 1934, Ambedkar protested, but Periyar did not do much. By then he had probably decided that his politics was Aryan versus Dravidian, and abusing Tamil Brahmins. The rest of the country was not his problem as Tamil Nadu already had a strong reservation policy. Ambedkar and Periyar didn’t converge on this one aspect – Ambedkar had rejected the Aryan Invasion Theory.
After 1934, Ambedkar wrote many letters, put his case to the British more than once, but ran into the same wall – education levels among Scheduled Castes were too low for a fixed quota. British didn’t announce any reservations for the SCs.
Then he got an opening in 1942. The Second World War was on. The British had dragged India into it without the consent of local governments. Congress leaders resigned from office consequently and began preparing for the Quit India movement.
The Raj needed Indians who would stand with it during such critical times. In July 1942, a new Viceroy’s Executive Council was formed. Ambedkar was given a place in it by the British. No active Congress leader joined the council though. The next month Congress launched Quit India. Ambedkar opposed it. The British noticed and appreciated the support.
Ambedkar knew it was the right opportunity. He put the reservation demand back on the table and asked for a change in the 1934 rules. In a memorandum to the Viceroy, he demanded that Scheduled Castes be recognized as a minority, that they get exclusive reservation in the central legislature, and that they get 13.5 percent reservation in jobs — close to their share in the 1931 Census.
In wartime the British did not want another fight with Indians. In August 1943, they changed the rules and gave Scheduled Castes a fixed 8.33 percent quota in central jobs. Even under pressure during wartime, the British did not cede completely to Ambedkar’s original demand of 13.5% quota. They again cited low levels of education among the SCs. But for Ambedkar, it was still a big win, because several other demands also went through.
Reservation in the central legislature was accepted in part. The number of nominated Scheduled Caste members in the Central Assembly was increased. They also accepted Ambedkar’s demand for ‘age relaxation’ in qualifying criteria for SC candidates, scholarships for SCs, and a demand that exam fees be a quarter of what the general category pays. As I had told you, every ‘affirmative action’ or the reservation policy has been in place even before the country gained independence.
On Ambedkar’s demand of recognizing Scheduled Castes as a minority, the British were evasive. They were willing to give minority-like rights, which they did, but they realized that recognizing SCs as a minority group would explicitly declare them as non-Hindus. They knew that Congress and other nationalist leaders would explode, and the situation would become unmanageable.
The war ended in 1945. By then, a view was growing within Britain that leaving India would be cheaper than holding on to it. In 1946, after Jinnah’s Direct Action Day, the widespread communal riots only added to that feeling. The British had probably already decided that leaving was the wiser course.
That same year Ambedkar again asked the British to raise the quota for SCs. Through his party, the All India Scheduled Castes Federation, he also revived the demand for separate electorates — only Scheduled Castes voting for their own representatives in the central assembly.
Fourteen years earlier, after the Poona Pact, he had to drop that demand. Gandhi’s opposition had produced a settlement in which assembly seats were reserved for Scheduled Castes, i.e. it was ensured that only an SC candidate would win, but the entire Hindu electorate would vote to elect the winner. In elections held under that system Ambedkar’s party had lost most reserved seats to Congress. Now that the British seemed willing to listen, he put separate electorates demand back on the table.
The British refused, because it amounted to declaring Scheduled Castes non-Hindu by the back door. But to keep Ambedkar happy, they raised the job quota from 8.33 to 12.5 percent. That figure held till Partition and Independence.
Which is why I wrote in the beginning of this article that the law of reservation in this country had arrived before the Constitution did.
Two weeks after Independence, Ambedkar was made the chairman of the Constitution Drafting Committee. His attitude and approach here was not as adamant and angry as it had been on the Viceroy’s Council or on the political stage.
On several questions he took a balanced line. He accepted that reservation in jobs should not be higher than 50 percent. He settled on a ten-year limit on reservation in legislatures, while adding a caveat that personally he favored a longer period. The separate electorates he had demanded only a year earlier, he dropped.
Furthermore, reservation was not placed in the Constitution as any fundamental right. It was kept as an enabling provision i.e. wherever the text speaks of equality or equal opportunity, an exception is added; governments may make special provisions for backward classes and weaker sections.
So reservation is not a constitutional right in the way many of its defenders sell it.
All appears fine till now. Reservations that were in place in British India were not only to continue, but were to be expanded in other regions too, but then a curious thing happens as soon as India adopts its new constitution and it comes into force. On the basis of this same Constitution, the reservation already running in Madras is struck down as illegal.
As recounted earlier, in 1921 the Justice Party came to power in Madras Presidency after the Congress boycotted the elections, and within a year it implemented reservation policy. In 1927, that policy was given fixed quotas for different groups, unlike Kolhapur and Mysore. In effect there was no open or general category left in Madras. Everyone competed inside a quota. After Congress won in Madras later, the government changed, but the policy did not.
When India adopted the Constitution, the Madras formula looked like this: Out of 14 seats, 2 were left for Brahmins, 6 for non-Brahmin Hindus including the landholding castes, 2 for backward castes, 2 for Scheduled Castes, and one each for Muslims and Christians.
On 26 January 1950 the Constitution came into force. Two people went to the Madras High Court. Champakam Dorairajan and C.R. Srinivasan — both Brahmins. Despite good marks, one was denied a medical seat and other an engineering seat. They told the Court that Article 15 said there would be no discrimination on grounds of caste, and Article 29(2) said no one would be kept out of a state educational institution on grounds of caste. Why were they being kept out for being Brahmin then?
The High Court heard them, read the Constitution, and found out that they were right. It held the Madras reservation policy unconstitutional.
There was an uproar, and not only in Madras. The case went to the Supreme Court. A third Brahmin arrived there with another petition. B. Venkataraman, a lawyer, had applied for a munsif’s post. He was qualified and still did not get the job, because only 2 of 14 seats went to Brahmins.
The Supreme Court heard all three and reached the same conclusion: the Madras reservation policy was unconstitutional. The Centre panicked. It did not want riots in the name of reservation. Nehru had no trust in Periyar. A few years later he would call him a criminal and lunatic.
Ambedkar was furious too. After all, the Court had used the Constitution written under his chairmanship to kill reservation, even though enabling provisions existed. He said that while he was bound to obey the Court, he was not bound to respect it.
So, what exactly happened? Why were reservations declared illegal despite the enabling provisions?
What had happened was this: In the final draft, the enabling provision for reservation was not attached to Article 15. It was attached only to Article 16, which dealt with jobs. One reason may be that the British had accepted reservation in central jobs, but reservation in schools and colleges had not been fully settled, so the Government of India Act had no such clause. There was also a provision in the Directive Principles for special efforts by the state for backward classes. The framers may have thought they did not need to add the enabling provision in every article.
However, the Supreme Court said that the Fundamental Rights cannot be subordinated to Directive Principles. Without an enabling clause in Article 15, reservation in educational institutions could not be called constitutional. Dorairajan and Srinivasan, asking for medical and engineering seats, were right.
But what about Venkataraman? Article 16 did have an enabling provision for jobs. Why did the Court accept his case too?
His argument was this: Scheduled Castes one can understand, but since when did the entire Muslim or the Christian community become backward? The enabling provision is for backward classes. Is every Muslim and every Christian backward just because of their religion? The Court agreed with this line of argument and thus his petition was also found valid.
During the Constituent Assembly debates, Pandit Hridyanath Kunzru had warned that the Drafting Committee had left the definition of backward classes a bit vague. The Supreme Court pointed at the same vagueness and struck down the entire Madras reservation policy.
The court’s order was going to impact entire India. Caste-based reservation then existed mainly in the South, but Congress had decided in principle that the policy would be extended to other parts of the country too. But the Supreme Court got there first.
To get out of the crisis, the Nehru government immediately brought the First Amendment and added an enabling provision to Article 15 for making reservation in educational institutions legal. Muslims and Christians were not added as ‘backward classes’ in that amendment, but later, most people from both these communities were inserted into the OBC lists by citing the original castes they had belonged to when they were Hindu.
It is a tragedy that this back-door entry into reservation is so rarely discussed. Very few people even realize that a majority of Muslims and Christians today take the benefit of the current quota system, in the name of OBC reservation. The foundation for this back-door entry was laid after the First Amendment itself.
Today, when one thinks about an instance of a government overturning a Supreme Court order, the mind usually goes to the Shah Bano case in Rajiv Gandhi’s time in 1986, or people point to Narendra Modi’s government passing a bill in 2018 to keep the SC-ST Act undiluted. The habit is older. It begins in 1951, within months of the Constitution coming into force, when the Nehru government amends the Constitution to overturn the Supreme Court verdicts on reservation and on freedom of speech. Ambedkar backed Nehru fully on this.
Independent India has since taken the reservation issue to court many times, and amended the Constitution many times, to expand it or to keep it running. After implementation of Mandal Commission report, the case went to the highest court where Supreme Court reminded the country of Ambedkar’s 50 percent cap on reservations. A 1995 amendment made reservation in promotions for SCs and STs constitutionally safe, while a constitutional amendment in 2019 gave EWS a 10 percent quota.
The dice that began rolling in 1902 is still rolling. Almost a hundred and twenty-five years later.
And now the debate is about reforming reservation.
What should happen next is a debate for another day. What cannot wait is a change in how this history is read. The entire fight, and the entire tension, sits on that lens.
The first thing that has to be accepted is that the inequality which grew among Hindu castes had a large colonial hand driving it. Dumping everything on Brahmins and varna-jati system is intellectually lazy and in fact, evil. The second thing that has to be accepted is that in the colonial period, and after Independence too, the behavior of some Brahmins and other upper-caste people did create bitterness and a sense of injustice among other castes. The third thing to accept is that circumstances have changed drastically now, and that self-styled Ambedkarites now do far more to spread that bitterness than the Brahmins. Refuse to accept any one of these three, and this debate will never end. Then you do not want a debate. You want a fight.
I have no expectations from the Left, or from the self-appointed Ambedkarites. But people who call themselves nationalists or who believe in Hindutva need to think. The tragedy is that many of them also love to blame it all on Brahmins and varna-jati system, either out of ignorance, or out of a desire to look liberal and progressive.
You go ahead and support reservations, no issues. But why must you support the atrocity literature that parks every sin on Brahmins and on Hindu dharma? We have already seen that a century and a half of British rule is primarily the reason why inequalities grew. Why should the Madhya Pradesh government have to recite Ekalavya and Shambuka stories in the court in the same subverted manner in which the Left and the anti-Brahmin ideology loves to? Why not use Dharampal’s research to form your independent arguments? We have numbers that show communities falling behind in education and in social standing as the English system hardened. Why repeat fabricated tales of 5,000 years of oppression? Even if you are arguing for reservation, write your own literature. The facts are in front of you. The history is in front of you.
And those who oppose reservation but still believe in Hindutva have a different challenge – do not let your rhetoric become a caricature of left’s argument that Hinduism is nothing but just a tool by Brahmins to keep others in subjugation. Talk to people from other communities. Look for allies there. You will find them. Not everyone wants a civil war.
You can arrive at a solution only after you have at least understood the facts and the story behind them. As I wrote earlier, how we see our past decides how we shape our future.
A video version, in Hindi, of the above article can be watched here:
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