Invisible Histories and Methods in Dalit Studies: The Role of the Mohalla Archives

The words “Dalits” and “untouchables,” and references to “Dalit activism,” were absent from the first prominent discussion of the public sphere in the journal South Asia’s 1991 special issue on “Aspects of ‘the Public’ in Colonial South Asia.”Footnote ¹⁵ Yet, in 1990, discussion on caste had entered the Indian public sphere in a dramatic fashion. Caste-Hindu student groups had led a year-long agitation against the Indian government’s decision in August 1990 to implement the Mandal Commission Report, which recommended the extension of affirmative action to include lower-caste Hindu groups, previously confined only to Dalit and Adivasi (indigenous) communities. Fearing reservations would limit their own employment opportunities, caste-Hindu student groups organized widespread protests in Indian cities against the implementation of affirmative action quotas. Dalit student organizations staged counter-demonstrations to defend the principle of affirmative action and protest the historical injustice of caste inequality.Footnote ¹⁶ The “Introduction” to the South Asia special issue identified “two distinct arenas” of the public sphere: “one constituted by the political discourse” typically associated with nationalist groups, and the other represented by local “familial and fictive kin-based” groups typically associated with advancing caste identity politics.Footnote ¹⁷ Chris Bayly has argued that in the early twentieth century untouchables were “‘invisible’ and, more importantly they were theoretically and spiritually disempowered,” and therefore Dalit actors received scant attention from nationalist groups.Footnote ¹⁸ The historiography of the public sphere has focused primarily on the nationalist Hindu middle-class groups. The lack of awareness of Dalit vernacular sources (or lack of access to them) has contributed to the elision of early Dalit activism from Indian historiography. Inspired by Shahid Amin’s emphasis on “historical fieldwork,” we can see how engagements with archival sources preserved in Dalit mohallas must radically transform our understandings of the histories of vernacular public spheres.Footnote ¹⁹

The invisibility of Dalit activism within English-language academia demonstrates the dominance caste-Hindu groups have acquired in institutional and academic settings. In genealogies of Indian democracy, interventions by Dalit organizations have been considered derivative of practices established by Indian nationalist organizations. In his 2001 essay, Atul Kohli has emphasized “the role of the Indian nationalist elite and nationalist movements in the birth of Indian democracy.” Since independence, the “spread of democracy has implied that norms and practices of democracy—not only independent voting, but also expressing dissent, and forming associations to press demands—have been embraced by more and more people, including those at the bottom of India’s social structure.”Footnote ²⁰ The more recent visibility of Dalit activism since the 1980s and 1990s, especially the Bahujan Samaj Party’s political interventions, is typically explained as initiatives to protect “caste-based reservations” which have transformed “castes into interest groups”Footnote ²¹ and fostered “a sense of caste identity”Footnote ²² politics. Dalit activism is historicized as derivative of earlier Indian nationalist political methods and discourses. Founded in 1984, the Bahujan Samaj Party achieved extraordinary electoral success in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, winning a legislative majority and forming the government several times between 1990 and 2007. Greater visibility of Dalit movements after the 1990s in the public sphere have “met with violent backlashes” that have posed historiographical dilemmas in South Asian studies.Footnote ²³ Recovering the much longer history of the Dalit public sphere forces us to recognize the fundamental contributions Dalits have made not just to identity politics but to the histories of democracy, liberalism, and the public sphere.

The study of the Indian public sphere has revealed the value of vernacular sources in tracing the hegemony achieved by Hindu middle-class groups in colonial India. The 1991 South Asia special issue highlighted these middle-class groups’ reliance on textual sources of Hindu and Muslim religious traditions to redefine public and private domains. The Muslim service gentry generated an extensive discussion of how its domestic private spaces (khas), comprising women, eros, and paganism, was reformed by instilling orthodox textual Islamic values.Footnote ²⁴ The Hindu middle class fashioned its secular image by raising “the women question” in the nineteenth century to advance the ideals of the conjugal relationship, and it achieved that objective with the support of the colonial state, which enacted new laws.Footnote ²⁵ Its agenda to transform gender relations has been historicized as having drawn from “elite upper-caste Hindu imaginations” within which the ideal of the Aryan woman represented the Hindus’ glorious past and accommodated their concerns for modern, educated wives.Footnote ²⁶ The middle-class Hindu sensibilities of the sati-savitri model idealized the chaste and devoted woman, and this gendered ideal defined the autonomous women’s movement that developed in the 1920s, which advocated for child marriage reforms.Footnote ²⁷ For example, professional and mercantile groups in the city of Surat in western India appropriated the notion of rights rooted in the Jain-Hindu religious vocabulary for the purposes of electoral politics. Terms such as dharma (religious duty), maryada (honor), rashtriyavad (nationalism), and svatantrata (independence) were used to define concepts central to Indian nationalism.Footnote ²⁸ Indeed, the history of the north Indian ecumene is premised on the discourses of rights, duties, and just kingship borrowed from caste-Hindu religious ideals and Sanskrit vocabulary, marshalled to forge a shared national identity.Footnote ²⁹

The study of vernacular public spheres reveals the seminal role played by regional languages as mediums of knowledge production that shaped the literary and cultural histories which enabled the “upper-caste intelligentsia” to wield considerable influence in the provinces.Footnote ³⁰ In Maharashtra, the caste-Hindu intelligentsia actively ignored the Dalit groups demand to address questions of caste inequality.Footnote ³¹ Francesca Orsini’s masterly study traces the rise of small-town caste-Hindu elites who played a leading role in the formation of the Hindi language, further solidifying their hegemony over the Hindi public sphere. The caste-Hindu elite actively promoted Vedic-Aryan ideals in the literary media as foundational cultural resources for present-day Indian society.Footnote ³² In contrast, Dravidian advocates of devotion to a pure Tamil language (tamilparru) sought to cleanse it of the influences of Sanskrit terms and fostered fidelity to a Hindu Shaivite religious ethos untouched by Brahmanism.Footnote ³³ Caste-Hindu elites in the coastal Andhra region successfully forged a new linguistic and political loyalty to the Telugu language (Telugu talli), but deliberately ignored the activism of its most famous martyr, Potti Sriramulu, to end discrimination against untouchables.Footnote ³⁴ Dalit actors have been invisible both in the South Asia special issue and in subsequent histories of the Indian public sphere due to the nationalist caste-Hindu groups domination of academic scholarship and the public sphere.

Studies of subaltern activism in colonial India have argued that it is the paucity of vernacular sources written by subaltern groups which have informed the method and approaches to the history of subaltern politics. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s influential work on labor in colonial Bengal has drawn attention to the persistence of caste hierarchies in working-class politics.Footnote ³⁵ However, evaluating the contributions of the Subaltern Studies volumes to historical methods, he has argued that the “problem of subaltern pasts dogging the enterprise” was to “ground the struggle for democracy in India in the facts of subaltern history.”Footnote ³⁶ Most studies of subaltern consciousness, such as Ranajit Guha’s seminal article “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” explained the rebellious acts of peasants in supernatural terms and not with reference to social and economic facts.Footnote ³⁷ Subaltern histories highlighted activists such as Dhorai, a low-caste activist who used language and idioms associated with the mythic past of Lord Rama, the moral authority of Ram-Rajya, to interpret and engage with the Congress-led national movement.Footnote ³⁸ Guha’s article on the Santal Adivasi rebellion relied exclusively on the colonial archive and lacked sources from Santal organizations and Lutheran and Jesuit missionary archives—two sets of co-participants.Footnote ³⁹ Uday Chandra writes that the latter two sets of sources contain vital information on Santal Adivasi rebels’ motivations, suggesting a longer secular engagement with the colonial state relating to their rights over resources.Footnote ⁴⁰ Historians of working-class politics have acknowledged the challenges in recovering the voices of labor activists.Footnote ⁴¹ Chandavarkar has written about the “silence” of working-classes sources which has forced historians to depend on “those who spoke on their behalf: trade unionists and political leaders, journalists and social workers, civil servants and lawyers.”Footnote ⁴²

The field of Dalit Studies has emerged from an innovative approach to sources that combines historical fieldwork in Dalit mohallas with close readings of the vernacular writings that fieldwork has revealed. Dalit historical sources are typically housed in Dalit activists’ homes rather than in formal libraries or state archives. They circulated almost exclusively within Dalit networks at political and cultural events and were rarely encountered or preserved by non-Dalits. Dalit activists have informally performed the role of archivists by preserving sources in wardrobes and trunks in their own houses. They have consciously built personal collections by recognizing the value of historical print material, including diaries and newspapers, as part of their commitment to Dalit politics. Acknowledging the discovery of Marathi language chapbooks and newspapers in mohalla archives in untouchable neighborhoods, Anupama Rao writes in the preface of her 2009 book, “It would be impossible to write Dalit history without the private collections of activists such as V. Moon, G. Pantawane, and R. Shinde.”Footnote ⁴³ Mark Juergensmeyer’s exceptional 1982 study of the Dalit Ad-Dharm movement in Punjab in the 1920s and Ravindra Khare’s 1984 ethnography of Dalit activism in Lucknow both highlighted the methodological role of mohalla archives.Footnote ⁴⁴ Drawing from the Telugu-language sources found in Dalit activists’ homes, Chinnaiah Jangam’s 2018 study unearthed the history of vibrant Dalit activism in Hyderabad led by activists, such as Bhagya Reddy Varma and Jalal Rangaswamy, who actively engaged with the Gandhian national movement.Footnote ⁴⁵ G. Aloysius discovered the Tamil Dalit publications of the Adi-Dravida activist Iyothee Thass in Chennai, enabling him to document Thass’ organizational efforts between 1890 and 1914 and his singular efforts to claim Buddhism as the original religion of untouchables.Footnote ⁴⁶ A number of new studies in the last decade have recovered, for the first time, vibrant histories of parallel Dalit public spheres in a wide range of regional languages in the early twentieth century.Footnote ⁴⁷

Dalit feminists have similarly utilized personal collections in mohalla archives of Pune and Mumbai to recover new dimensions of gender history and challenge dominant notions that untouchable women had more freedom than caste-Hindu women.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the 1980s, Urmila Pawar and Meenakshi Moon recorded the voices of twenty-nine surviving Dalit women participants in the Ambedkar movement whose voices had been absent from mainstream histories.Footnote ⁴⁹ Feminist scholars have highlighted the role of Dalit mohallas as a site of struggles for human dignity and against dominant masculine cultural norms.Footnote ⁵⁰ Contemporary Dalit Hindi feminist writers have emphasized individual struggles for education, while negotiating hegemonic boundaries of caste and patriarchy, with the goal of acquiring middle-class professions considered vital to achieving dignity.Footnote ⁵¹ Lucinda Ramberg recovers the history of Dalit women Jogatis (Devadasis) as “auspicious women,” keepers of the devotional tradition related to non-Sanskrit Shakta religion embodied in village goddesses Yelamma and Matangi.Footnote ⁵² Occupying this ethical space in villages in northern Karnataka empowered Jogatis with the rights to inherit and transfer property rights.Footnote ⁵³ We must recognize that the ethno-historical fieldwork in Dalit mohallas and the efforts of Dalit activists themselves to preserve important documentation of their own pasts in their private collection played a pivotal methodological role in the emergence of the Dalit Studies.

African American historians have interrogated the critical relationship between sources and historiographical priorities to demonstrate the methodological value of material produced by stigmatized groups. Dalit pasts have been silenced because of “uneven power in the production of sources, archives, and narratives,” an argument that Michel-Rolph Trouillot has elaborated to explain the general silencing of the Haitian revolution by Western historiography.Footnote ⁵⁴ Therefore, it is imperative to incorporate historical materials produced outside of academia, including, for instance, alternative Dalit vernacular narratives of the past to investigate the “one-sidedness” of the sources and narratives in the “theories of history.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Such methodological insights have contributed to the expansion of the history of the American public sphere by making visible Black activism and contributions to its political thought. Houston Baker, Jr., for example, has argued that the historiography of American liberalism has been unwilling to recognize or even acknowledge “black cultural work” comprised of religious songs, musical ministry, oratory, and church meetings, which “can be conceived as ceaselessly inventing its own modernity.”Footnote ⁵⁶ According to Michael Dawson, the invisibility of Black political thought was maintained by claims that it was derivative of white American liberalism, and by actively ignoring and dismissing practices that challenged the dominant narrative.Footnote ⁵⁷

Historical fieldwork in Dalit mohallas and the search for untouchable histories in vernacular languages outside the privileged English-language academic settings have contributed significantly to recovering histories of Dalit public spheres in various provinces. Dalit mohalla archives have emerged as alternative sites of historical sources and the informal collections of chapbooks in activists’ houses have played an active role in preserving and circulating Dalit Hindi language histories. Instead of studying untouchables through the pollution cliché, as Gyan Prakash has cautioned us against,Footnote ⁵⁸ historical fieldwork has helped recover Dalit activists as vernacular historians. The recognition of Dalits as proactive actors is a historically contingent development linked to political events in the 1990s marked by public discussion over caste, the rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party, and the emergence of Dalit student, literary, and feminist organizations.Footnote ⁵⁹ The contemporary visibility of Dalit actors has prompted the search for histories of the Dalit public sphere, and the methodological developments that have resulted from this have notable parallels with the discussion of the Black public sphere in the 1990s.Footnote ⁶⁰ Baker’s opening essay of Public Culture’s special issue “The Black Public Sphere” drew attention to the changed political context. He argued that the “[Black] struggle under King’s leadership moved from ‘invisibility’ to legal civil rights victories,” coupled with a greater recognition by the mainstream American media and academia.Footnote ⁶¹

The Adi-Hindu Mahasabha: A New Introduction

Swami Achutanand’s four song-booklets, the Mahasabha press’s twenty-five chapbooks, and another dozen published by affiliated Dalit groups between 1916 and 1960 offer fresh insights on the activists who led the Adi-Hindu Mahasabha and on that movement’s patrons. These sources revise the history of the movement in three key areas: (1) they reveal the role Dalit patrons played in supporting poet-activists in Agra, Delhi, and Kanpur; (2) they bring to light the emergence of a Dalit literate public and its relationship with the Mahasabha; and (3) they uncover Mahasabha poet-activists’ motivations in creating new social (Achut) and political (Adi-Hindu) identities. Histories of the Adi-Hindu Mahasabha by R. S. Khare (1984), Nandini Gooptu (2001), Badri Narayan (2004), and Ramnarayan Rawat (2011) have mainly relied on two major Hindi books by Chandrika Prasad Jigyasu.Footnote ⁶² The first is a history of the original inhabitants of India published in 1965 while the second is a 1968 biography of Swami Achutanand.Footnote ⁶³

The Mahasabha’s innovative organizational approach produced one of the largest Dalit movements in early twentieth-century India. In February 1922, Swami Achutanand and his fellow poet-activists of the Achut Caste-Reform Sabha played a leading role in organizing the untouchable procession and conference in Delhi. As president of the Mahasabha, Achutanand successfully arranged for a highly visible national conference of Dalit leaders from different provinces of the subcontinent, including Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, in Allahabad, from 26–28 December 1927. At this conference, the Dalit leaders announced their unanimous position on the question of mulki-haq—demanding separate electorates and proportional representation in legislative assemblies in the provinces. The first day began with a march of twenty-five thousand Dalit activists and leaders through Allahabad’s streets to the conference venue of Mayo Hall.Footnote ⁶⁴ This national meeting was planned to coincide with the annual meeting of the Indian National Congress held on the same dates in Madras (Chennai) to deliberate on representation in the provincial legislative assemblies, and especially on the allocation of seats to minorities. The Adi-Hindu Mahasabha, as a Dalit organization, developed the political technique of counter-demonstrations to actively engage with the Congress and caste-Hindu groups.

In 1923, first-generation Dalit poet-activists, educated in government vernacular secondary schools between 1890 and 1910, established the Adi-Hindu Mahasabha at a gathering of several hundred people in Etawah town in western Uttar Pradesh. Swami Achutanand (1879–1933), based in Delhi and later Kanpur, and Kavi Jagatram Jatiya, based in Delhi, played leading roles in founding the Mahasabha.Footnote ⁶⁵ A group of Jatav Mahasabha leaders in Agra and Delhi, led by its vice-president, Babu Hiralal Bodhilal, persuaded Achutanand to expand his work on education and activism from Mainpuri and Agra to Delhi. A prosperous trader in Agra, Babu Hiralal Bodhilal, had emerged as a major patron of Achutanand and funded the publication of his first song booklet in 1916, the Hari-Bhajan Mala Part I. In 1917, Achutanand moved to Delhi, where he lived for seven years in a Paharganj mohalla which had a sizeable presence of Dalits, mainly from the Chamar-Jatav community, who were engaged in a number of trades. There he met his two core associates, poet-activists Jagatram Jatiya and Devidas Jatiya, and together in 1917 they founded the “Achut Caste-Reform Sabha” in Delhi. These three poet-activists emerged as the leading writers of the Mahasabha’s song booklets. The 1924 Adi-Hindu Bhajanavali Part IV introduced Achutanand as the “chief-leader of the Achut Sabha and editor of Achut newspaper in Delhi.”Footnote ⁶⁶ In 1925, Achutanand moved to Kanpur at the invitation of Dalit patrons who offered him a house and a printing press to further strengthen the Dalit movement. He lived there until his premature death in July 1933 at the age of fifty-three.

The founding of the Adi-Hindu Mahasabha Press in 1925 enabled Dalit poet-activists to circulate a political agenda within its distinctive audience which would further strengthen the incipient movement. Dalit publications would no longer be tethered to individual patrons, which had been the case with Achutanand’s four song-booklets; instead, the Press regularly published song-booklets, speeches, and newspapers from 1926 to 1933. It published two additional books: the Ram-Rajya Nyaya Natak in 1936 and the Adi-Vansh ka Danka in 1940.Footnote ⁶⁷ This first generation of poet-activists contributed actively by composing song-booklets for the press. Although Swami Achutanand and Kavi Jagatram Jatiya were its most visible faces, several other poet-activists such as Devidas Jatiya from Delhi, Dr. Ramswarup Jaiswar from Lucknow, and Babu Prabhu Dayal Kureel from Kanpur also published song-booklets with the Mahasabha’s press. These incorporated verses composed by poet-activists based in small towns in Uttar Pradesh, including by Kanhaiyalal Mantri from Fatehgarh, Hira Lal Jatiya from Kannauj, and Nekram from Etawah. The song-booklets also contained compositions by unknown individual authors, such as a 1928 “kajari” song on mulki-haq rights. Shanti Bai, Achutanand’s daughter, was one of the two editors of Mahasabha’s publications and the Achut newspaper from Kanpur. Married to the Mahasabha activist Thakur Chand Kain, her name first appeared as the “composer” of Arjun ke Gumnami Bujdile, a 1928 chapbook providing a brief history of Achutanand.Footnote ⁶⁸ Chandrika Prasad Jigyasu, a close associate of Achutanand, built on this commitment to print by starting the Adi-Hindu Propaganda Press in 1940 and later the Bahujan Kalyan Prakashan in 1960, in Lucknow. The latter became the most prominent Dalit publishing house in northern India. In addition to publishing Swami Achutanand’s biography and his plays, the Bahujan Kalyan Prakashan published nearly ninety titles by Dalit authors between 1960 and 2006. Currently there are two active Dalit presses in Delhi: Samyak Prakashan and Siddarth Books. This century of publication is critical to the present-day strength of the Dalit movement in northern India.

Access to employment opportunities and to secondary school education in late British India also played a decisive role in creating a vernacular Dalit literate public in urban centers and small towns in northern India.Footnote ⁶⁹ The label “Dalit literate public” builds on Nandini Gooptu’s definition of “a new generation of literate untouchables,” which describes the education level of poet-activists and untouchables engaged in service occupations who were educated in Hindi-language government-run schools.Footnote ⁷⁰ However, I use it to highlight a new relationship between the literate untouchables employed in secular (casteless) “naukari” (service) in small trades, workshops (karkhanas), and industries. A Persian Hindi word, naukari was used in a 1942 Dalit chapbook, Yaduvansh ka Itihas, to describe new kinds of employment that untouchables had entered into early in the twentieth century.Footnote ⁷¹ As the 1929 Hindi Sabdasagar (dictionary) notes, the term “public” describes “the ordinary people, the masses” in the Indian context, indicating a group distinct from the caste-Hindu middle class.Footnote ⁷² The Dalit literate public was not restricted to only those who were literate but also included the illiterate audiences which were receptive to the bhajan medium and attracted to the Mahasabha’s vision. The poet-activists employed songs in a variety of genres as their primary medium, indicating shared social milieu with the illiterate “masses.”Footnote ⁷³ Mahasabha leaders utilized songs regularly during conferences and processions. In conference settings, bhajan songs were typically sung at specific times during the day, including before the inauguration of the conference and between speeches. The 1927 report on the two-day Allahabad conference specifically mentioned that Mahasabha bhajan songs were sung.Footnote ⁷⁴ Given the vital role of songs, song-booklets were sometimes printed before important conferences. The Harihar Bhajan Mala Part II, for example, was printed on 13 February 1922, two days before the three-day Depressed Classes Conference in Delhi and a day before the counterdemonstration to welcome the Prince of Wales.

This Dalit literate public emerged out of naukari occupations in urban areas. Naukari occupations in the construction industry, the railways, and small businesses, and as government teachers in rural schools provided members of the Dalit literate public with independent means of livelihood. Two Dalit Hindi texts, Yadav Jivan (1929) and Yaduvansh ka Itihas (1942), mention the presence of Chamars in “naukari” occupations and highlight their strength in the “building-construction trade” and “the railway service.” According to Yaduvansh ka Itihas, Chamars had the largest presence in the “building-construction trade,” covering the entire gamut of that workforce, including “business-owners, supervisors, skilled workers (mistari), and laborers.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In addition, urban untouchables worked “as paid municipal employees or domestic servants of the British, and at times in factories.”Footnote ⁷⁶ The Hari-Bhajan Mala Part I (1916) equated naukari occupations with dignity and development, and songs such as, “Holi ka hullar” highlighted opportunities provided by these modern professions. The first stanza of the song lists occupational titles of trades taken up by members of the Dalit public, “byopari [trader], thekadar [contractor], Seth [merchant], and Babu [clerk]” and identifies these as evidence of a “new moment and progress” in British India.Footnote ⁷⁷

The 1931 Uttar Pradesh census provides information on naukari employment and trades within select untouchable castes such as Chamars, Pasis, and Bhangis, and distinguishes them from those listed in the traditional caste occupation categories. Since the Yadav Jivan and Yaduvansh ka Itihas focus on the Chamar caste, I offer a closer examination of their presence in naukari occupations. At 12.6 million, Chamars comprised nearly 60 percent of the Dalit population in Uttar Pradesh. The 1931 census identifies ten categories of naukari occupations: “i) industries: owners, managers, clerks etc., ii) transport, iii) trade, iv) public force, v) public administration, vi) arts and letters professions, vii) persons living on their income, viii) domestic service, ix) contractors-clerks-cashiers etc, and x) labourers unspecified.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Chamars had no presence at all in professions associated with elite and middle-class groups, such as public administration and arts and letters. However, they occupied 9 percent (270,000) of the naukari trades out of a total working population of 3.1 million and had a sizeable presence in the “trade” and the “contractors-clerks-cashiers etc” categories. The census data nicely illustrates claims made in Yadav Jivan and Yaduvansh ka Itihas on Chamars’ noticeable presence in the naukari trades and offers an impressive testimony of an untouchable community’s tenacity in taking advantage of naukari occupations. Thekadar Ramdayal Jatav, a contractor in the building-construction trade, supported Swami Achutanand in organizing the public meeting in Etawah in December 1923 at which he founded the Mahasabha. A group of Dalit traders and contractors, including Girdhari Lal Kuril, Jhamlal Aherwar, and Seth Durga Dasji in Kanpur, supported Achutanand by providing resources to purchase a printing press.Footnote ⁷⁹ Mahasabha leaders understood the financial and human costs of running the press, which they described as an arduous and uphill task.Footnote ⁸⁰ These naukari professions opened up opportunities previously unavailable to Dalit communities in ways that were unprecedented. The Mahasabha’s agenda to reframe “untouchables” social and political identities particularly appealed to this Dalit literate public.

The Mahasabha leaders were creative in their approach to political organization and resourceful in adopting effective terms for activism. They introduced Achut as a positive social identity for untouchables in the 1920s to advance their struggle for dignity. They actively promoted the use of Achut as an alternative to the popular pejorative Sanskrit (Hindu) term asprsya jati, meaning polluted and impure. Achut first appeared in a sixteen-page Mahasabha song-booklet, the Adi-Hindu Bhajanavali Part IV (1924), which contained eighteen songs in Hindi song genres composed by Achutanand, Jagatram Jatiya, and Kanhaiyalal “Mantri” from Fatehgarh in western Uttar Pradesh.Footnote ⁸¹ A four-line verse on the cover page of the text described untouchables as Achut and defined the term as untouched and pure.Footnote ⁸² Although these ideas first appeared in Achutanand’s Hari-Bhajan Mala Part I (1916) and Harihar Bhajan Mala Part II (1922), the term Achut first appeared only in 1924. The masthead of Mahasabha press publications from 1926 carried a one-line verse: “Jai Achut (Pavitr) Satguru Bhagavan” [“Hail Achut (pure), the Supreme Lord”]. The masthead would typically also include a couplet from Kabir, one of the leading poet-saints of the Sant-mat devotional tradition: “We eat by touch, we wash by touch, we are born by touch; who’s untouched, asks Kabir? One who is pure, the supreme lord [Satnam].”Footnote ⁸³ The Ad-Dharm movement of Dalits in Punjab that emerged in 1925 had adopted Achut as its identity because of its relationship with the Mahasabha.Footnote ⁸⁴ The term occupied a foundational role in Mahasabha poet-activists’ claim that untouchables are the original residents of India because they are untouched and pure. Achut became the first term coined by Dalit activists in modern India to promote a radical oppositional identity among untouchables.

Swami Achutanand and his fellow poet-activists named their organization the Adi-Hindu Mahasabha. They intentionally used the term “Adi-Hindu” to assert a collective political identity of untouchables by claiming sovereign rights over Hindustan—a name commonly used in Hindi media but less so in English. Adi-Hindu defined untouchables as the “first” (Adi) residents of “Hindustan,” with Hindu denoting a geographical space rather than a religious identity. In the Hari-Bhajan Mala Part I (1916), Swami Achutanand insisted that untouchables were not only the earliest residents of Hindustan, but many had been chieftains with principalities. He argued that the evidence for this claim came from the Rig Veda, circa 1500–1200 BCE, which mentions battles between Aryans and local clans who are described as asuras (demons) or dasas (slaves). He writes, “Rise, you original residents and inhabitants of this Hindustan, who have been weakened; it was those oppressive Aryans who grabbed our wealth, food, and place.”Footnote ⁸⁵ The cover page of the Harihar Bhajan Mala Part II (1922) states that its writers, Swami Achutanand, Jagatram Jatiya, and Nekram, had “recovered the glorious forgotten history of the Prachin-Hind-vasi (Aboriginal Indians) from the Rig Veda Sayan Bhashya, Literary Society, Allahabad, and Historical texts of the History Publication Committee, Banaras.” This was followed by a four-line verse:

In this historical narrative, the Mahasabha poet-activists described the Aryans and their descendants, present-day Hindus, who arrived from the west to establish their control over Hindustan. The Aryans enslaved the original residents of Hindustan and took over their “wealth, food, and place.” By adopting the term “Adi-Hindu,” Mahasabha poet-activists joined the movements among untouchables in other parts of India that were growing in the 1920s: Adi-Dravidas (1919), the Adi-Andhra and Adi-Hindu movement in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh (1922), and the Ad-Dharma movement in Punjab (1925).

By drawing from a range of literary genres and scholarly methods to cite written historical sources, the Mahasabha poet-activists demonstrated a remarkable commitment to creating a new politics of self-respect. Having built small, fragile fortunes through the “building-construction trade,” “the railways,” and other naukari occupations, the literate Dalit public recognized the transformative change that had taken place in late British India. These Dalit authors used the term naukari to emphasize the secular, casteless character of service occupations defined by monetary transactions in contrast to the caste-based obligations that predominated in rural India. Dalit patrons readily supported the poet-activists in establishing the Adi-Hindu Mahasabha and its printing press. The social identity of Achut and the political identity of Adi-Hindu appealed to this literate Dalit public. In today’s Dalit movement in northern India, “mool-nivasi” (original inhabitants) has replaced “Adi-Hindu,” but the meanings associated with this concept remain relevant in Dalit politics. Jangam has cautioned against the emphasis on radical Dalit activism, arguing that Bhagya Reddy Varma-led Adi-Andhra group in Telugu-speaking South India was attracted by the nationalist Hindu reform organizations’ objectives of removing caste barriers.Footnote ⁸⁷ Mahasabha poet-activists were deeply invested in the freedom which enabled political organization, publishing, access to education, and the articulation of social and political rights.

Bhajans of Liberal Politics: Representative Government and Equality

Addressing a meeting of several hundred Dalits in the district town of Mainpuri in western Uttar Pradesh in October 1926, Swami Achutanand declared that the “Mahasabha’s objective is to demand the distribution of mulki-haq according to the proportion of [untouchables’] population” in the legislative assembly. The Government of India Act of 1919, also known as the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, had introduced provincial assemblies with extremely limited franchise along with separate and proportional representation for minorities.Footnote ⁸⁸ It extended the principle of separate electorates, which had been confined to Muslims, by including Sikhs in Punjab and Non-Brahmans in the Madras Presidency.Footnote ⁸⁹ At a daylong meeting in Mainpuri, Mahasabha leaders passed resolutions demanding proportional representation in village and town councils, in state government employment, and in educational institutions. They repeatedly used the term mulki-haq to refer to the concept of separate (communal) electorates and proportional representation. They participated in the debate over parliamentary democracy in the 1920s that would lead to the expansion of the electorate to one-sixth of the adult population through the Government of India Act of 1935. In addition to mulki-haq, another critical category Mahasabha poet-activists introduced was unch-niche (high-low) to define caste inequality and the struggle for equality. I found the discussion on representation and equality in the works of Jennifer Pitts (2005) and Helena Rosenblatt (2018) extremely helpful in recognizing mulki-haq and unch-niche as critical liberal principles.Footnote ⁹⁰ Rosenblatt has argued that “civil equality, constitutional and representative government” emerged as core principles of liberalism in the early nineteenth century.Footnote ⁹¹ In the Indian context, the Mahasabha’s vernacular liberal terms aspired to capture these liberal values.

The Hindi-language liberal terms created by Mahasabha poet-activists in late British India offer fresh insights into Dalit appropriation of liberalism. Ajay Skaria has argued that Chris Bayly’s work on the intellectual history of modern India has demonstrated the “irreducibly global nature of modern historical processes” because activist groups based in the margins, outside the metropole, participated in creating universal ideas.Footnote ⁹² The Mahasabha’s distinctive vernacular terms emerged in a dialogue over the nature and scope of representative government. Metcalf writes that the British commitment to “liberal idealism” continued to motivate discussion on representative government despite the insistence on racial difference.Footnote ⁹³ Departing from earlier studies by Anil Seal and Eric Stokes, which have emphasized the role of colonial institutions and administrators in building democratic practices,Footnote ⁹⁴ Bayly argued that elite Indian nationalists “were able to excavate, appropriate and cannibalise” liberalism within their local contexts. Indeed, the nationalists elaborated ideas of moral and political rights, and of self-government from the classical Hindu texts such as the Manusmriti, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Ramayana.Footnote ⁹⁵ Women’s groups utilized the language of citizenship and rights advanced by the colonial state to challenge caste and patriarchy and demanded legal decrees to remove social barriers.Footnote ⁹⁶ Bengali Muslim peasants articulated a distinctive political agenda on the question of rights to intervene in the discussion on representative government based on the limited franchise that emerged after the Government of India Act of 1919.Footnote ⁹⁷ Andrew Sartori insightfully documents Bengali Muslim cultivators’ “aspiration to freedom” built on the widely shared Islamic notions that aligned religious piety and ethics with cultivation of land and ownership of property as a natural right.Footnote ⁹⁸ Both the Mahasabha poet-activists and Bengali Muslim cultivators borrowed the language of universal liberal values in similar ways, raising an important methodological challenge to accounts that restrict the study of liberalism in British Empire to a limited set of canonical thinkers.Footnote ⁹⁹ Karuna Mantena’s study nicely illustrates the challenges the British faced in legislating liberalism because it required negotiating with the particularities of Indian customary laws and proprietary rights.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Pitts has suggested that studies of liberalism might benefit by recognizing, “Liberal theory has been constituted by its engagement in politics,”Footnote ¹⁰¹ and I would submit that the Mahasabha’s song-booklets illustrate liberalism’s deeper sociological entanglements.

The Mahasabha poet-activists articulated a separate political identity of Adi-Hindu to justify their demand for mulki-haq—separate electorate and proportional representation in the legislative assembly based on the percentage of the untouchable population in each province. They also demanded extending the principle of mulki-haq to employment in the state administration and to admission into educational institutions. The Mahasabha engaged with the colonial state on the nature of representative government at a time when discussions over “responsible government” and “self-government” were taking place in India. The 1919 Act had included new religious minorities in separate electorates, but it opened a new opportunity for Dalit organizations as well. The Mahasabha intervened in this debate by publishing the Harihar Bhajan Mala II (1922) and by organizing the three-day Depressed Classes Conference. Mangoo Ram, the founder of the Ad-Dharm movement in Punjab, told Juergensmeyer in 1971 that the struggle against caste along with the demand for separate electorates contributed to the emergence of their autonomous Dalit movement in Punjab in 1925.Footnote ¹⁰² The leaders of nationalist organizations promoted “the concept of indigenous local assembly, the panchayat,” in offering an alternative form of representative democracy in the 1920s.Footnote ¹⁰³ In the 1928 Nehru Report Congress leaders refused to accept caste inequality as a legitimate reason for awarding separate electorates to Dalits. The demand of mulki-haq, first raised by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar as a legal measure during the 1919 constitutional discussions, acquired a sociological depth in the Mahasabha’s literary and political activism.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

First broached in the 1922 Harihar Bhajan Mala Part II and in the Depressed Classes Conference, the most detailed discussion of mulki-haq appeared in Achutanand’s Mainpuri speech in 1926, and soon the Mahasabha poet-activists incorporated this concept into songs in several genres that appeared in a number of song-booklets. The “kajri” song, sung in the Bhojpuri-Hindi dialect, defined different features of the mulki-haq agenda which formed a major theme in the Adi-Hindu Bhajan Mala: Achut Bhajanavali, published in August 1928, a few months before the Mahasabha’s Lucknow meeting that November.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Composed in a rhythmic tempo with each line of the verse stating the candid message effectively, the kajri song appeared in several Mahasabha song collections and was included in the 1960 biography of Achutanand.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The song contained a list of demands and ends by asking the Mahasabha leaders to tell the British government that Achuts were India’s ancient rulers and original inhabitants (Adi-Hindus). The English translation does not fully capture the melody of the kajri:

The Mahasabha song-booklets also introduced unch-niche as a conceptual category in the Dalit public sphere to define caste inequality as a structural feature of South Asian society and to advocate for social equality. The 1924 Adi-Hindu Bhajanavali Part IV contained twelve devotional songs and several used the term to convey an astute recognition of “the new age of equality” instituted by the “British government.” Several songs in the Bhajanavali praised the role of institutions and laws in achieving civil equality, including, the importance of the press and publication, the vital role of education, notably for girls, the leadership of Achutanand, and the Adi-Hindu history of untouchables. In one song appropriately titled “Rasiya” (sweetness), the Mahasabha identified the emergence of representative institutions as a notable development in Indian history.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Songs of this genre are sung to welcome the cool monsoon rains after the harsh hot summer months and also to express love for a lover or devotion to God. Dalit poet-activists used the rasiya genre to convey admiration for modern institutions, especially the rule of law and legal regulations which promise justice regardless of caste.

A few years earlier another song in the “qawwali” genre published in the 1922 Harihar Bhajan Mala II, equated the novel age of equality with modern institutions established by the Raj. The qawwali contrasted the institutions of British India with their emphasis on equality with the edicts of Manusmriti (the laws of Manu), which upholds and justifies caste hierarchy (unch-niche).

The qawwali referred to representative institutions and the rule of law which offered the promise of a good life in the twentieth century. The rasiya and qawwali songs vividly demonstrate the Mahasabha’s use of the term unch-niche to define its struggle against caste inequality and highlights the substantive role assigned to the state and the constitution in creating civil equality.

Mahasabha poet-activists linked the struggle against unch-niche with the twin humiliations of caste and gender discrimination experienced by Dalit women. Addressing a gathering of nearly six thousand Dalits in Gwalior in July 1933, Swami Achutanand pointed to sexual violence against “our women” by caste-Hindu men who indulge in such atrocities. He specifically drew attention to the organized sexual harassment Dalit women faced every year during the spring festival of Holi when caste-Hindu men would enter Dalit villages singing lewd songs and molesting them. Achutanand stated with much anger that “the greatest dirty songs are sung for [our women] to hear.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Mahasabha leaders highlighted the sexual humiliation of Dalit women’s bodies at work places and in homes as a feature of caste privilege in rural society.Footnote ¹¹² Middle-class Hindu groups defined the role of women in the private domain and the consequent “politicization of the domestic” in the nationalist project, whereas male Dalit activists defended the self-respect of women and daughters who experienced caste-sexual violence.Footnote ¹¹³

Several speakers at the July 1933 meeting in Gwalior, including Chandrika P. Jigyasu and Kalyan Chand Jatiya, raised the question of the appropriate marriage age for girls and boys. This was a subject of intense nationalist debate at this time, led by caste-Hindu women’s organizations. Speakers at the conference urged the audience to focus on the education of their children, refrain from marrying girls until age fourteen and boys until age twenty as required by law, and not burden them with marriage.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The Mahasabha’s song-booklets contained songs addressed to Dalit parents, mainly mothers, to prioritize the education of children. The 1922 Harihar Bhajan Mala II contained six songs (out of twenty-eight) on this topic. The “Stree Shiksha Bhajan” (Women’s education song) advised “mothers” to send their daughters to schools, which would prepare them for becoming “officers and barristers.” It pleaded with parents to invest resources in education and not in intoxicants.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The six songs by these male poet-activists focused on access to education in order to secure secular professions for Dalit women. Mahasabha poet-activists identified a structural relationship between caste and sexuality, education and dignity, and secular professions and freedom.

The poet-activists actively promoted an ethical framework to further strengthen commitment to liberal institutions and political activism. To achieve this objective, they appropriated Satnam, the formless supreme lord, from the Sant-mat religious tradition, as the ethical source of its liberal politics. Known by several names in the Sant-mat religion, including Jagadhar, Kartar, and Karim, Satnam appears in the teachings of almost all of the medieval poet-saints belonging to the Sant-mat tradition, such as, Kabir, Raidas, Dadu, and Nanak. The Mahasabha in its publications repeatedly argued that Satnam promised equal rights to all human beings and opposed the poisonous’ distinctions of unch-niche. Ramswarup Jaiswar, a Lucknow-based Mahasabha leader, eloquently captured the liberal attributes of Satnam in the opening lines of his 1926 twelve-page song-booklet:

Sant-mat religious tracts, such as the 1926 Vigyan Bhajan Mala and the 1927 Raidas Bhajan Mala published by the Mahasabha press, identified two distinct moral sources of the Dalit public sphere: Satnam and the state. Drawing from these ethical sources, these poet-activists argued that in this age of equality, “unch-niche is no longer a thing,” and described the “Kanun of Manu” (Manu’s constitution) as a relic of the past. The institutions of the modern state, including representative democracy, provided a juridical justification for the Mahasabha’s struggle for civil equality and Satnam offered an ethical genealogy.

The Sant-mat religion had a distinctive presence in Dalit mohallas which made it easier for the Mahasabha poet-activists to adopt its existing vocabulary, using such terms as unch-niche, mulki, haq, and Satnam to translate liberal ideas into vernacular concepts.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Dalit scholars of Hindi literature, such as, Kanwal Bharati and Mohan Dass Namishray, have discussed the critical role of the Sant-mat religion in Dalit mohallas. Footnote ¹¹⁸ The medieval Sant-mat poet-saints Raidas and Kabir had used the term unch-niche in verses to illustrate that Satnam, the supreme lord, did not distinguish between high (unch) and low (niche) caste devotion but only cared for true piety. Raidas was an untouchable poet-saint of the fifteenth century who self-identified as a member of the Chamar caste. His verses also capture a core principle of his teachings that the distinction between unch-niche should be contested in the worship of god:Footnote ¹¹⁹

The Mahasabha publications, such as the Hindu-Vansh ka Prachin Gaurav (1926) and the Ram-Rajya Nyaya Natak (1936), compared the teachings of Raidas and Kabir in promoting ideas of equality and freedom with the teachings of the Hindu religion narrated in the Ramayana and Manusmriti in defending caste hierarchy.Footnote ¹²⁰ Given its Sant-mat genealogy, “unch-niche” as used conceptually in Dalit activism in the twentieth century drew from a much longer history of usage and it continues to play an active role in the rhetoric of the Bahujan Samaj Party in India today. A recent biography of Kanshi Ram, the founder and ideologue of the Bahujan Samaj Party, had no hesitation in asserting that the “ideas of Kanshi Ram were similar to Kabir, the two recalcitrant fighters against the ideology of unch-niche.”Footnote ¹²¹ In urban Hindu middle-class usage in north India, the phrase unch-niche is more commonly used to refer to uneven ground, as is evident in the popular children’s tag game, “unch-niche ka papada.” Most middle-class Indians associate unch-niche with this game, in which a person who is “it” has to tag a player who crosses the boundaries of high and low ground regardless of whether the group of kids have selected unch, any raised surface, typically steps, or niche, a flat and even surface.

Unch-niche first emerged as a conceptual category in the 1922 Harihar Bhajan Mala II, in which Achutanand used the term to describe caste inequality. The Mahasabha’s publications and its activism redefined the normative meaning of unch-niche in late British India. S. W. Fallon’s New Hindustani-English Dictionary (1879) offered three definitions of unch-niche: “a) the unevenness of ground, b) goodness and evil or profit and loss, c) ups and downs of life.”Footnote ¹²² Fallon used Hindi proverbs to highlight each of these meanings, with a particular emphasis on uneven ground and the vicissitudes of life. John Platts’ 1884 Urdu-Hindi-English dictionary described unch-niche as an adjective for “high and low,” along with “unevenness, inequality, undulating ground.”Footnote ¹²³ The first edition of the Hindi language dictionary Hindi Sabdasagar in 1916 acknowledged the three dominant meanings of unch-niche and listed additional definitions, as “small/big” and “belonging to noble descent or low birth.”Footnote ¹²⁴ Clearly, ideas of high caste and low caste existed within these definitions which may explain Platts’ use of the word inequality, but he does not elaborate the context of its use. It is instructive that the second edition of Hindi Sabdasagar (1967) repeated the definitions of unch-niche in the first edition but excluded the 1933 Concise Hindi Sabdasagar definition “of low caste and of high caste.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Only in 1993 did McGregor’s Oxford Hindi Dictionary for the first time explain “unch-niche” as “inequality (social and political),” referring to caste inequities.Footnote ¹²⁶ This suggests that the Mahasabha’s conceptual revolution received recognition in the dominant Hindi literary public sphere only in the 1990s, the decade marked by greater visibility of Dalit politics in north India, including the rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party.

The Mahasabha’s activism in northern India adds a new dimension to the history of Dalit public spheres in the provinces in late colonial India. A critical objective of Dalit struggles in western India was to resolve the “contradiction between the experience of stigma and possibility of emancipation” by forcing the colonial state to adjudicate through official and legal policies.Footnote ¹²⁷ Dalit groups raised civil rights concerns and organized public processions between 1927 and 1929 to demand the right to enter Hindu temples and access public water points.Footnote ¹²⁸ In the first decade of the twentieth century, Ayyankali, a Dalit leader in the Travancore region of South India, led struggles demanding for Dalits the right to enter public streets and attend public schools.Footnote ¹²⁹ The Adi-Andhra movement in the Telugu-speaking region of South India shared an intellectual relationship with the nationalist organizations.Footnote ¹³⁰ Whereas, in northern India, the Mahasabha and the Ad-Dharm Mandal organized processions in Delhi and Allahabad to demand mulki-haq, and projected the Sant-mat religion as an alternative to Hinduism. The Mahasabha’s publications do not discuss or mention processions to demand entry into Hindu temples.Footnote ¹³¹ Similarly, the Adi-Dravida movement of untouchables in Tamil Nadu insisted upon separate electorates and maintained its autonomous character despite strong overtures from the leaders of the powerful non-Brahman movement for joining their struggle.Footnote ¹³²

A diverse set of motivations embedded in distinct regional cultural contexts shaped the contours of each of these Dalit public spheres in different ways. Yet, Dalit regional leaders participated in the December 1927 conference organized by the Adi-Hindu Mahasabha in Allahabad and collectively signed a declaration demanding mulki-haq rights in the provincial legislative assemblies. They had issued the unanimous statement for the forthcoming constitutional negotiations during the Simon Commission’s visit to India in 1928–1929. Unlike the histories of subaltern struggles, such as the Awadh peasant movement, whose leaders borrowed ideas of justice from Lord Rama’s ethical kingship of Rama-Rajya,Footnote ¹³³ the Mahasabha poet-activists borrowed ideas of justice from liberal institutional discourses and connected these with concepts drawn from earlier Sant-mat poet saints. While caste-Hindu nationalists were drawing nationalist vocabulary from Vaishnavite religiosity and Sanskrit terminology,Footnote ¹³⁴ Mahasabha poet-activists were drawing their conceptual categories of Achut, mulki-haq, and unch-niche from the Sant-mat religion. Many of these terms continue to inform the politics of Dalit organizations in northern India today. These features distinguished the 1920s politics of the Adi-Hindu Mahasabha in Uttar Pradesh and created a distinctive genealogy of Dalit politics in northern India. The Mahasabha appropriated method and agenda from an existing cultural repertoire to promote the new principles of representative democracy.