In the days after Mahatma Gandhi was shot dead by Nathuram Godse in January 1948, a fire swept through the villages of the Deccan. It did not target the assassin or the organisations blamed for the killing. It targeted Brahmins– Godse’s caste. From Pune and Satara down to Belagavi, across a patchwork of thirteen princely states, mobs went from village to village with cans of kerosene and lists of Brahmin properties. Homes were looted and burnt, crops torched, men beaten and in some places killed, and whole families driven out of villages their ancestors had lived in for generations.
Few episodes of modern Indian violence have been so widespread and so thoroughly forgotten. The government of the day treated the attacks as a routine law-and-order problem. No comprehensive relief was offered. Most victims never filed a police report, and many quietly forgave their attackers so that they could one day come back and sell what was left of their land. What survives in public memory is a handful of individual accounts: anecdotes that are wholly insufficient to reconstruct the tragedy in its entirety.
This article attempts a fuller picture. It draws on survivor testimony gathered in Sangli district, on newspaper reports of the time, on the findings of an enquiry panel sent by the Hindu Mahasabha, on confidential official correspondence, and on the report of a judicial commission led by a Bombay High Court judge. Together they make a case that the violence was neither spontaneous grief nor a random outbreak of disorder. It was organised, it was driven by a long-nurtured ideology of anti-Brahminism, and Gandhi’s murder merely supplied the excuse. Its consequences, and the silence surrounding it, continue to shape Maharashtra’s politics even today.
The village lies in Khanapur tehsil of Sangli district. In May, this part of Maharashtra is unbearably hot. On the afternoon I visited, a grey haze of dust hung over the road and the village had fallen quiet. The tin roof of the house promised brutal heat inside. Walking barefoot across the unshaded aangan felt like trudging over hot ash; the hibiscus lining the courtyard were frizzling in the sun.
The man I had come to meet was 90. He had just had his lunch and was preparing for his nap, sitting on an ancient-looking wooden bed and scratching his emaciated bare chest. His eyes were pale and sunken. A soot-laden table fan was all there was to beat the heat. ‘Make it quick,’ his grandson said. The old man’s hearing was poor. “Speak up,” the grandson interrupted as I began to explain why I had come, so I asked him to nod if he could hear me. He nodded, and I began recording.
He spoke in a thin voice, almost a whisper, looking past me as he talked. Sitting opposite him, I doubted the fan would carry his words to the phone; only the modulation waves on its screen reassured me.
He could not remember whether he had been in the seventh or the eighth grade on that fateful day. School had reopened after the days of mourning for Gandhi, and he was happy to be back among his friends. He was walking home with them when someone shouted his name. It was the goldsmith, whose shop was the first in the village, gesturing agitatedly for him to come over. The goldsmith asked him to stay a while, saying his father had asked him to. It was not unusual. In those days people often asked neighbours to watch the children while they went to the bazaar or the kacheri. But after a while the boy grew anxious. His father might be home by now, he said, and his mother surely was. The goldsmith could no longer hold him back.
When he reached home, at first he did not recognise it as home. The entire Baman alley, the Brahmin lane, was in flames. Was he in the wrong place? His house had been right here when he left for school that morning. It was quiet all around, except for the crackle of burning wood and the smell of smoke. Then his father came running out of the groves across the alley and dragged him back. His mother, his siblings and the other families of the Baman alley were huddled among the trees, crying, embracing each other, staring with wet eyes at the black smoke rising above them. All seven Brahmin houses in the village had been ransacked and torched. Evening fell, a chill settled in the air, and he clung to his mother for warmth.
Around midnight, people from across the alley arrived with bags of grain and milk. They said nothing, set the provisions on the ground and left at once, as if making an offering to appease some spirit. The families in the grove had no firewood and no pots to cook in, so some of the men risked a trip to the smouldering heaps and returned with half-burnt pieces of furniture. The women quickly and unfussily set up a chulha. He remembers his mother warming the milk in a broken earthen pot.
In the morning they all went back to the ruins to retrieve whatever the plunderers had not carried away and the fire had not consumed. There was hardly anything left. He did not know who the attackers were; he only overheard his father and the neighbours say they had come from other villages. One name kept cropping up in their conversations: Nathuram Godse. The boy had heard of Mahatma Gandhi and knew he was dead, but this was the first time he heard of Godse.
The nightmare did not ease in the days that followed. Brahmin children were attacked on their way to school. The men decided to take turns escorting them, but the arrangement fizzled out as families left the village one after another, all except his. His father tried to reach relatives elsewhere, only to find that they, too, had been driven from their homes. After a month or two, his father gave up trying to leave and accepted his fate.
We had been talking for just over ten minutes, and the effort had exhausted him. His story, I realised, was no different from the others I had heard.
The grandson came out to see me off. He was unmarried and looked to be in his forties. He would have moved to the city, he said, but had stayed back to look after his grandfather. There was a gloom in his voice.
I set off for Sangli and stopped for lunch on the way. My phone vibrated: it was the grandson. I thanked him again for arranging the interview and told him his family’s story would make an interesting read. He did not seem to hear. ‘Are you going to name us?’ he asked. Such questions are usually settled at the start of an interview; he had not raised it when we met.
‘If you don’t want it, I will skip it,’ I replied, feeling a setback: anonymous stories are rarely taken seriously. ‘Do you have any concern?’ He did not respond immediately. ‘You said you would use it for the book you are writing. You also said you had met several families like ours who had been through similar trouble. So why do you need one more story?’ I explained that without their names and the name of the village, it would be impossible to trace them. ‘Don’t name us,’ he said. I assured him I would not.
That evening, back in my hotel room, I had barely begun transcribing the recording when the phone rang again. It was the grandson. ‘Hello, tell me,’ I said, trying to sound cheerful, though I knew something was wrong. He was firm: ‘Don’t use it at all.’
I was stunned and reminded him that I had already agreed not to use their names. But his mind was made up. ‘Mine is the only Brahmin family left in the village,’ he said. ‘People here even call me names to my face. We have no land. I am the only ‘Bhatji‘ here, and people call me for their religious ceremonies. That is my only source of income. If anyone finds out that my aajoba spoke to you, I could lose my livelihood.’
Surely people had turned the page by now, I suggested. It is not easy to be a Brahmin in a village, he replied, and kept insisting that I delete the recording. I promised to use it in such a way that no one could trace it back to his family. Only then did he seem satisfied. That is why neither the family nor the village is named here.
The old man’s family lost everything but their lives. Many others were less fortunate.
In Terdal, about 90 km south of his village, five Brahmin men were locked in a house and set on fire. Their families could not identify the charred bodies to perform the last rites.
In a village near Terdal, the attack began at night. The mob beat a Brahmin black and blue, plundered his wada and set it on fire. They broke one of his legs. He did not know what had become of his family. He escaped and limped towards the next village in search of help, only to be thrashed again by the villagers there. He crawled on to another village for shelter, but the mob found him. In the morning they brought him back to his own village in a procession. Bloodied and half-dead, still searching for his family, he was told he would be cut down unless he set fire to his neighbour’s house, the house of another Brahmin.
In the villages of Satara, Brahmin men who dared to resist were executed, and their bodies were incinerated in the fires of their own homes. Ajra taluka in Kolhapur was badly hit: mobs sacked and torched more than 120 Brahmin properties. Forty ‘Deshpande women’ were abducted from these villages and held in isolation for three days before being rescued, at the last moment, from violation. In the temple town of Narsobachi Wadi in Kolhapur, according to press reports, not a single Brahmin house was left standing, and their standing crops burned for days. Batches of refugees, now outcasts in their own villages and fearing harassment and molestation, walked through the night towards the safety of the towns.
The violence was so intense and so widespread, especially in the villages, that the community eventually had to resettle in the cities. Many villages of southern Maharashtra have, in effect, been ‘cleansed’ of Brahmins.
The worst affected were the border villages of the Kolhapur, Sangli and Miraj princely states. They fell into a grey zone. With the merger of the princely states into the Union of India under way, the states had lost interest in protecting their territories, while the Bombay police could not intervene until the merger agreements were signed.
The Brahmin-ruled states of Sangli, Miraj and Kurundwad hastened the process and acceded to the Union within a week of the outbreak of arson and rioting. Bhor State, in the Satara region, lacked the wherewithal to control the riots; its meagre forces were no match for the mobs. Bombay was ready to help, but only once Bhor had merged into the Union. The formalities were completed at lightning speed, and Bombay dispatched a heavily guarded police party to restore order. On the highway at Nasrapur, a crowd armed with axes, swords and spears blocked its path. The two sides fought for hours before the police opened fire, killing two people.
Newspaper reports of the time describe the unfolding tragedy vividly, and they reveal a method that repeated itself from village to village.
Gangs of non-Brahmin men arrived in a village shouting Mahatma Gandhi ki jai and demanded that the village elders lead them to the Brahmin houses. Elders who refused were warned that they would share the Brahmins’ fate. The men carried cans of kerosene on their shoulders. At each Brahmin house, the leaders beat the male members until they handed over the keys and revealed where the cash and jewellery were kept. The family was ordered to leave with nothing but the clothes they wore, not even a book.
The plunder proceeded in an orderly fashion. The gang first searched for cash and jewellery and burnt the documents and account books. Then the village men went in for the grain stocks and drove away the cattle. The village women carried off the vessels and furniture. Once the house had been emptied of everything movable, the gang sprinkled kerosene on the mattresses, tied them to the wooden beams and set them alight. Before moving on to the next village, they did not forget to ask where the Brahmin’s fields lay, and torched the standing crops. Once more, Mahatma Gandhi ki jai rang through the air. The family watched the fire from a distance, thanking their stars that their lives had been spared.
The perpetrators were not faceless. Inflamed by the ideology of non-Brahminism, they used Gandhi’s murder as an excuse to settle scores with Brahmins, once and for all. That, in so many words, is what they said.
Across parts of the Deccan, from Pune and Satara to Belagavi, including 13 princely states, bands of men moved from village to village, beating large drums (davandi) and announcing that the Nehru government had ordered the Brahmins to be wiped out within the thirteen days of mourning. Once the drummers left, the charged crowds turned on the village Brahmins. The mobs carried lists of Brahmin properties, plundered whatever they could carry and set the rest on fire.
An enquiry panel sent by the Hindu Mahasabha to the riot-affected areas concluded that the Talim Sangh: community gymnasiums run mainly by Marathas in Kolhapur and Sangli, had played a leading role. Established by some Maratha leaders in 1946, the Talim Sangh was rooted in an explicitly anti-Brahmin outlook. Leaders of the Satyashodhak Samaj and the Praja Parishad had long been inciting non-Brahmins against Brahmins, and the Talim Sangh became, in effect, the military arm of the non-Brahmin movement. The panel also found ministers and administrators of the princely states of Kolhapur, Kurundwad, Sangli and Miraj complicit in the violence.
The concern was not confined to Hindu organisations. In a secret note to Morarji Desai, then home minister of Bombay province, the president of the Kolhapur Congress, Ratnappa Kumbhar, demanded an immediate ban on the Talim Sangh for its communal propaganda and the disbanding of the private armies that had wreaked havoc on the Brahmin community after Gandhi’s murder.
A senior ICS officer who visited the riot-hit areas of Kolhapur reached a similar conclusion in a confidential note prepared for the Ministry of States of the Government of India: ‘There is no doubt in my mind that the whole campaign against the Brahmins was well organised, and Gandhiji’s murder gave them an excuse for carrying out the political designs of the local unscrupulous Maratha clique.’ He also accused the political leaders of using members of the talim sangh as their militia.
Kolhapur, the largest state in the Deccan, was ground zero, and its ruler, the Chhatrapati, was reluctant to order an enquiry. Sardar Patel prevailed upon him and sent his confidant, V.P. Menon, to announce one. Menon also asked the Chhatrapati to dismiss his ministry: the ministers were widely accused of inciting the anti-Brahmin violence, and their continuance in office could compromise the investigation.
The enquiry was entrusted to N.H.C. Coyajee, a judge of the Bombay High Court. It lasted five months, and Justice Coyajee visited some of the worst-hit areas, including Jaisinghpur, Narsobachi Wadi, Ichalkaranji and Hathkanagle.
The Coyajee Commission found four ministers guilty, including Chief Minister Vasantrao Bagal. Justice Coyajee concluded in his report:
Vasantrao Bagal, Chief Minister, who held the portfolio of Law and Order, I hold that his conduct during the disturbances was grossly culpable, that he neglected his duties and, in my opinion, by his conduct
As regards (ministers) D.S. Khandekar, N.T. Sarnaik and T.S. Karkhanis, I have indicated their default in my Report above and in my opinion, they are equally in default with the Chief Minister
In my opinion, the conduct of these four Ministers was such that by no stretch of imagination could they in the light of this evidence plead that this was on their part a mere error of judgment.
The commission went further, tracing the roots of anti-Brahmin sentiment in the region, particularly in Kolhapur, and describing how socio-political forces first alienated Brahmins and then persecuted them. After independence, the vitriolic anti-Brahminism of the Satyashodhak movement resurfaced. Anti-Brahmin elements, who had set their cause aside in answer to the larger call of the freedom struggle, revived the ballads, tamasha and pamphlets of earlier years to target Brahmins, with active support from the royal court and the Bagal ministry. Gandhi’s murder gave them the pretext they needed. Justice Coyajee held the Satyashodhak ideology responsible for the violence:
There is considerable evidence to indicate that there was a general anti-Brahmin feeling in the State for a long number of years and the activities of popular leaders like Madhavrao Bagal (prominent socialist and the elder brother of the chief minister) and his lieutenants like Dr Dhanawade (the court physician and one of the founders of Talim Sangh) incited and fanned this anti-Brahmin feeling.
If Kolhapur was eventually investigated, the violence within the Bombay province’s own jurisdiction was not, and the resistance came from within the ruling Congress.
Keshavrao Jedhe and Shankarrao More, respectively secretary and president of the Bombay Provincial Congress Committee, were former Satyashodhak members who had joined the Congress in the 1930s but continued to express themselves in an anti-Brahmin vocabulary. They accused the Chhatrapati of buckling under Patel’s threats in ordering the Kolhapur enquiry. Despite repeated assurances from B.G. Kher, the Prime Minister of Bombay, and his home minister Morarji Desai that the riots would be investigated, Jedhe and More opposed any enquiry. Because the party president himself was so strongly against it, the government did not press the matter.
The party had planned to pass a resolution naming the prevailing anti-Brahminism in the state as one of the causes of the riots; Jedhe and More forced it to be dropped. At a stormy party convention in Bombay on 7 March 1948, the non-Brahmin faction used every tactic to prevent the announcement of an enquiry. In the end, the party passed three resolutions: one accusing Hindu communal organisations of spreading the spiteful propaganda against the Congress and Gandhi that had led to his death; one urging the press to rein in its communal reporting of the riots; and one appealing to the people to keep the peace and follow Gandhi’s non-violence as a tribute to his memory.
The party gave way to the non-Brahmin leaders on yet another front. It had insisted that the government draw up a compensation package for the victims, but when the matter came up for discussion, the non-Brahmin faction contested it so fiercely that it was dropped. The same leaders rejected a proposal to impose a community fine if the violence continued; Jedhe argued that such a fine would make it difficult for Brahmins to return to their villages.
In the weeks that followed, Jedhe and More grew isolated. They kept up snide public remarks about Kher, a Brahmin, and Desai, a Gujarati. They blamed Patel for Gandhi’s murder, believing he had encouraged Hindu communalism, and attacked Nehru as an agent of the bourgeoisie led by the Dalmias, Bajajs and Birlas. In May 1948, they left the Congress to join the Peasants and Workers Party.
The Bombay provincial government treated the violence as a routine law-and-order matter and did little to punish those responsible. It lacked the will either to investigate or to deliver justice. In many places, people arrested for pillage and arson were released after writing letters of apology appealing to the victims’ kindness, and the victims, in turn, forgave them so that they could move on. Though they had left their villages for good, they knew they would have to return someday to sell their abandoned properties. When they did, they sold them for whatever they were offered.
Neither the Union nor the provincial government offered a comprehensive rehabilitation package. The district administration paid cash compensation to those who could furnish proof of damage, but many traumatised families could not summon the courage to go back to the local police station and file a report. The provincial government had imposed community fines to recover damages, but abandoned the policy under political pressure.
Such resettlement measures as the government did take were like a single grain of cumin to a hungry camel. It gave the victims loans but left their resettlement to local authorities — the same authorities who had been blind and deaf to their misery when the mobs came for them.
The destruction did not stop at Brahmin homes. Anti-Brahminism, mixed with socialist platitudes, was so entrenched in these parts that workers helped destroy the same mills and factories that employed them, throwing themselves out of work. Students set fire to schools; shop workers looted their own stock. Everything was fair game in avenging the Mahatma. Industries in Sangli and Miraj were ransacked, and neither the provincial nor the Union government offered any relief to the businesses. According to an estimate by the Maratha Chambers of Commerce, the loss of industrial property in Sangli, Miraj and Kolhapur alone was in the neighbourhood of ₹5 crore- roughly ₹10,000 crore in today’s terms.
Because so few victims came forward, and because the state chose not to look, little has been written about the tragedy. Some well-known victims have shared their accounts, but these remain individual stories -anecdotal evidence that cannot, on its own, reconstruct and assess what happened in its entirety.
In June, I returned to Sangli to meet a well-known figure in the city. I had planned it as a social visit. In his late sixties, he was not himself a direct sufferer, but I hoped he might connect me with families who held primary evidence: letters, perhaps, or a diary.
We met in his spacious office. After some small talk, I explained what I was working on, and his face changed colour. ‘Tumhala ka ukrun kadhayche aahet te sagle?’ he said with some force. ‘Why do you want to reopen the 1948 riots? We have moved on, and you are reminding us of our wounds? What do you intend to achieve?’
It was a wholly unexpected reaction, and I was at a loss for words. Seeing my discomfort, he forced a smile and shifted in his chair, gathering his thoughts. ‘Our village had 10–12 Brahmin families,’ he said, in a more conciliatory tone. ‘It was not far from where we are sitting. All the houses were completely gutted in the riots, and they left the village. My grandfather sent his children to Pune for education. These Brahmins were the Joshis, hereditary priests. My father would have followed his father, just as his father had. They all moved out of the village and, thankfully, avoided developing a ghetto mentality. The tragedy forced us to think differently. My folks took it as the wheel of fate. I do not feel as badly about it as other Brahmin families in Sangli do,’ he concluded, with an air of finality.
He made a point I had entirely missed: the sufferers did not capitalise on their tragedy. That is unusual in India, where past injustices are routinely converted into present gains. Maharashtra’s Brahmins did not wait for the government to rebuild their lives. They forgave their tormentors, believing it essential to move on, and migrated to safer places- from hamlets to towns, and from towns to cities such as Pune and Bombay.
Beyond the hard numbers lay human suffering, hardship and loss. The families of 1948 lost everything but hope, and rebuilt their lives without seeking official aid or public sympathy. In any other society, overcoming such hatred and violence might have been celebrated. In Maharashtra, Brahmins have continued to face brickbats.
The violence of 1948 still influences the state’s political landscape, yet no one openly acknowledges it. Avowedly Hindu organisations avoid the subject for fear of being branded Brahmin outfits; their opponents suppress it to cover up the darker side of their own ideological past. The state’s political narrative revolves around non-Brahminism, if not outright anti-Brahminism. Politicians across parties parrot Phule–Shahu–Ambedkar ideas mechanically and present them as Maharashtra’s foundational ideology. A Brahmin in a senior government position in the state remains unusual, and is seen as an anomaly.
In the 1990s, as a journalist, I knew Madhu Deolekar, a BJP member of the legislative council. He once asked me what I thought Balasaheb Thackeray’s greatest contribution had been. I offered a few answers. He shook his head with a teasing smile: ‘He made Manohar Joshi, a Brahmin, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra.’
The two encounters in Sangli capture the double bind that has kept 1948 out of the record. The man in his spacious city office had moved on and did not want the wounds reopened. The grandson in the village had not been allowed to move on, and was too afraid to let his grandfather’s memory be heard. Between those who will not remember and those who dare not speak, a tragedy that emptied entire villages of their Brahmins has remained a collection of scattered anecdotes. Until it is properly reconstructed, the full story of what happened in the weeks after Gandhi’s death will remain untold.
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