BUDDHISM IN DALIT HISTORIES

The many speculative histories of different dalit communities in the 19th and 20th centuries in India challenged the limits of the archives and assumptions about who constituted a historical actor. They also took on the authority of emerging histories of India written primarily by brahminical elites. As with Nehru and Savarkar, for these writers of dalit histories, history was a political language. It was also a way to table and account for dalit material existence and experience of life. It was, above all, a potent tool with which to frame a political project that could help challenge and change the conditions of that existence.

Perhaps the earliest of these speculative histories was penned by Jotirao Phule in the Pune area of the Bombay Presidency in the mid-19th century. Phule was an educated member of the kunbi-mali lower caste and went on to inspire generations of anti-caste activists. On the one hand, Phule worked towards practical goals like improving education among lower castes and dalits, campaigning for more jobs in the government for lower castes and ridding society of child marriage and enforced widowhood. On the other, Phule worked on the ideological plane and experimented with forms of writing (prose, ballads, polemics) to convey the injustice of caste.3 He used a number of popular mythical and religious symbols, rituals and even conflicts with creativity and imagination to rewrite lower-caste identity in Bombay Presidency (present-day Maharashtra, Gujarat and Karnataka) in the 1870s and 1880s. He claimed that lower castes and dalits had originally been kshatriyas (the martial castes) and put up the fiercest resistance to Aryan invaders, whose descendants were the brahmins. For their troubles, they were degraded to a low position on the caste hierarchy. Traces of this ancient conflict could be found in a number of myths, epics, legends and ritual performances and festivals. This amounted to a kind of ‘loss of caste’ or ‘loss of former greatness’ position.

Phule's interpretation proved influential, and many caste histories, until the rise of the Adi-Hindu, Adi-Dharma, Adi-Dravida, Adi-Bouddha movements in the late 1920s, adopted aspects of his approach.