Citizenship, Community and Democracy in India: From Bombay to Maharashtra, c. 1930–1960 9780815393627, 9781351188234

Citation preview

Citizenship, Community and Democracy in India

On 1 May 1960, Bombay Province was bifurcated into the two new provinces of Gujarat and Maharashtra, amidst scenes of great public fanfare and acclaim. This decision marked the culmination of a lengthy campaign for the creation of Samyukta (‘united’) Maharashtra in western India, which had first been raised by some Marathi speakers during the interwar years, and then persistently demanded by Marathi-speaking politicians ever since the mid-1940s. In the context of an impending independence, some of its proponents had envisaged Maharashtra as an autonomous domain encompassing a community of Marathi speakers, which would be constructed around exclusivist notions of belonging and majoritarian democratic frames. As a result, linguistic reorganisation was also quickly considered to be a threat, posing questions for others about the extent to which they belonged to this imagined space. This book delivers ground-breaking perspectives upon nascent conceptions and workings of citizenship and democracy during the colonial/postcolonial transition. It examines how processes of democratisation and provincialisation during the interwar years contributed to demands and concerns and offers a broadened and imaginative outlook on India’s partition. Drawing upon a novel body of archival research, the book ultimately suggests Pakistan might also be considered as just one paradigmatic example of a range of coterminous calls for regional autonomy and statehood, informed by a majoritarian democratic logic that had an extensive contemporary circulation. It will be of interest to academics in the fields of South Asian history in general and the Partition in particular as well as to those interested in British colonialism and postcolonial studies. Oliver Godsmark is currently Lecturer in International History at the University of Sheffield. He has published a number of articles on the history of late colonial and early postcolonial South Asia.

Routledge Studies in South Asian History

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com 7 Hindu Nationalism, History and Identity in India Narrating a Hindu past under the BJP Lars Tore Flåten 8 The Formation of the Colonial State in India Scribes, Paper and Taxes, 1760–1860 Hayden J. Bellenoit 9 Health and Medicine in the Indian Princely States 1850–1950 Waltraud Ernst, Biswamoy Pati and T.V. Sekher 10 Class Conflict and Modernization in India The Raj and the Calcutta Waterfront (1860–1910) Aniruddha Bose 11 Imperialism and Sikh Migration The Komogata Maru Incident Anjali Gera Roy 12 Politics and Left Unity in India The United Front in Late Colonial India William Kuracina 13 Citizenship, Community and Democracy in India From Bombay to Maharashtra, c. 1930–1960 Oliver Godsmark 14 India and World War I A Centennial Assessment Roger D. Long and Ian Talbot

Citizenship, Community and Democracy in India From Bombay to Maharashtra, c. 1930–1960 Oliver Godsmark

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Oliver Godsmark The right of Oliver Godsmark to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-8153-9362-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-18823-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgements Abbreviations Note on terminology

vi viii x

1

Introduction

1

2

Maharashtra between the wars: community, number and territory

20

3

Plotting out the province: plans and panics over reorganisation

54

4

Selecting Congress candidates in a democratising Bombay

83

5

Region, reservations and government recruitment

108

6

Classifying and counting language at the 1951 Census

138

7

Conclusion

167

Glossary Bibliography Index

179 182 195

Acknowledgements

This book is the result of a period of research and writing conducted over a number of years, as a consequence of which I have built up a number of personal debts. Throughout the first three years of this period, the School of History at the University of Leeds proved to be an intellectually stimulating environment in which to both conduct research and explore the ideas and hypotheses that structure this book’s major arguments. I have been fortunate to receive support, inspiration and advice from Will Jackson, Shane Doyle, Chris Prior, Ian Wood, Gina Denton, Nick Grant, Vincent Hiribarren, Tom Davies, Pete Whitewood, Henry Irving, Rachael Johnson, Simone Pelizza, Cathy Coombs and Juliette Reboul. However, I am most deeply indebted to William Gould and Andrea Major, who continue to be a constant source of sound counsel. I am also much obliged to the many scholars and students at the institutions at which I have worked, as well as those that have attended various conferences and workshops at which I have presented my research. In particular, the careful critiques, comments and conviviality of David Washbrook, Yasmin Khan, Sarah Ansari, Crispin Bates, Stephen Legg, Antoinette Burton, Tony Ballantyne, Jim Masselos, Robert Aldrich, Kirsten McKenzie, Simin Patel, Niels Brimnes, Santosh Suradkar, Rachel Ball, Shabnum Tejani, Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, Thoralf Klein, Marcus Collins, Chris Szejnmann, Emily Manktelow, Gaynor Johnson, Martin Thomas, Gajendra Singh, Beccy Williams, Gemma Clark, Tehyun Ma, Andrew Heath, Max Drephal and Saurabh Mishra both improved the general tenets and suppositions of the book and kept me sane! Extra special thanks must go to Taylor Sherman, who read the manuscript in its entirety and provided plenty of useful advice as the book was readied for publication. In both India and the UK I have made extensive use of a range of libraries and archives, and I would like to thank the staff at the Oriental and India Office Collections of the British Library, London; the National Archives of India, Delhi; the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi; the Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai; and the University of Mumbai Library, Mumbai. Trips to conduct archival research in India and present my work in various locations would not have been possible without the assistance of various grants and awards from the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, the Royal Historical Society and the World Universities Network. Dorothea Schaefter and Lily Brown also merit praise for the efficient and professional way in which they have managed the editorial process at Routledge.

Acknowledgements vii Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I would not have been able to complete this book without the enthusiasm and empathy of various friends and family. In Mumbai, I was beholden to the hospitality and kindness of the Tyabji clan, particularly Joanna Tyabji, Imran Tyabji and Suraiya Futehally. Back in the UK, I was extremely fortunate to experience the unswerving support of a whole range of people, but perhaps most importantly, the Sparrow/Glendenning family, and the Blakesley/Godsmark family. My father first instilled in me a genuine love of history, and I am sure he would have enjoyed seeing this project and my studies come to final fruition. My greatest debts are to Joanna, Nathaniel and Etta, who have tolerated with patience the time spent apart, and the long and sometimes arduous process that has ultimately resulted in this book.

Abbreviations

AICC BAWS BCC BLA BPCC BSP CHC CWC CSSH CWMG DCC EIC EPW GOB GOI ICS IESHR IMC IOR JAS LPC MAS MLA MLC MPCC MSA NAI NCP NMML OBC PCC PWP SCF

All India Congress Committee Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches Backward Classes Commission Bombay Legislative Assembly Bombay Pradesh (Provincial) Congress Committee Bahujan Samaj Party Congress High Command Congress Working Committee Comparative Studies in Society and History Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi District Congress Committee English East India Company Economic and Political Weekly Government of Bombay Government of India Indian Civil Service The Indian Economic and Social History Review Indian Merchants’ Chamber India Office Records Journal of Asian Studies Linguistic Provinces Commission Modern Asian Studies Member of Legislative Assembly Member of Legislative Council Maharashtra Pradesh (Provincial) Congress Committee Maharashtra State Archives National Archives of India Nationalist Congress Party Nehru Memorial Museum and Library Other Backward Caste/Class Pradesh (Provincial) Congress Committee Peasants and Workers Party Scheduled Caste Federation

Abbreviations ix SC(s) SMP SMS SRC ST(s) SWJN UP

Scheduled Caste(s) Samyukta Maharashtra Parishad Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti States Reorganization Commission Scheduled Tribe(s) Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru United Provinces/Uttar Pradesh

Note on terminology

Throughout this book I will refer to the particular area under study as Bombay Province, despite the fact that it was also known as and referred to by contemporaries as Bombay Presidency (after Bombay was declared a Presidency Town by the East India Company alongside Calcutta and Madras in the late seventeenth century). I have also chosen not to begin referring to this area of South Asia as Bombay State after 1950, when the nomenclature was changed for sub-national units of administration with the introduction of independent India’s first constitution. This is to avoid confusion with any references I make to ‘the state’. My study of ‘the state’ is not just about Bombay State, but also ‘the state’ at the levels of the nation, the district, and more locally. Whilst these levels are interconnected with one another, they are not reducible to one sole entity. Throughout this book, I have therefore endeavoured to make it clear which particular echelon of ‘the state’ I am referring to at that particular moment. I have also referred to the largest metropolis and administrative capital of Bombay Province throughout as ‘Bombay City’ in accordance with contemporary usage in the period under study, rather than using the present official pseudonym of ‘Mumbai’. The same reasoning applies to my references to all-India locations such as ‘Calcutta’ (Kolkata) and ‘Madras’ (Chennai), and Maharashtrian places such as ‘Poona’ (Pune) and ‘Thana’ (Thane).

1

Introduction

On 1 May 1960, Bombay Province was bifurcated into the two new provinces of Gujarat and Maharashtra, amidst scenes of great public fanfare and acclaim.1 This decision marked the culmination of a lengthy campaign for the creation of Samyukta (‘united’) Maharashtra in western India, which had first been raised by some Marathi speakers during the interwar years, and then persistently demanded by Marathi-speaking politicians ever since the mid-1940s. For many of its supporters, the creation of this new province was considered to mark out an exclusive domain for Marathi speakers within a newly independent India, to which they would intrinsically belong and in which their particular interests would be best served. This idea of Samyukta Maharashtra was also just one example of a number of concomitant demands based around similarly exclusivist notions of belonging. In fact, demands for the reorganisation of administrative boundaries in India on linguistic lines resulted in a wholesale redrawing of the political map in southern and western India during the 1950s. And these demands for provincial autonomy within a federal system also echoed a number of elements within certain articulations of the Pakistan demand. This book, therefore, uncovers a more allencompassing perspective on the postcolonial transition in South Asia, which sees partition as one example of wider developments in the subcontinent as a whole. The proponents of Samyukta Maharashtra were also keen to promote a wider sense of belonging to the province amongst the region’s various inhabitants. Conscious that Marathi speakers could be as easily divided on the basis of caste, religion, sub-region and class, they emphasised a common ‘cultural, literary and historical tradition’, premised on the memorialisation of a glorious Maratha past.2 Despite these claims, there was nothing necessarily intrinsic about belonging to Maharashtra, nor was there a natural unity on the part of the region’s inhabitants. Indeed, although this book will regularly refer to ‘Maharashtra’ when talking about the area or region on which it primarily focuses, this is not to suggest that a sense of Maharashtra was in any sense a primordial given. For some, in fact, the idea of Samyukta Maharashtra was primarily perceived as a threat. Amongst those individuals that spoke other and/or multiple languages, the creation of a Marathispeaking province that would serve the interests of the Marathi majority threatened to both undermine their ability to equally claim and exercise their citizenship rights, and fundamentally questioned the extent to which they even belonged in

2

Introduction

Maharashtra. Equally, whilst the term ‘Maratha’ had been employed historically to signify both a broader pre-colonial warrior heritage and a larger historical polity, in late colonial and early postcolonial Maharashtra it had come to be primarily used in a more exclusive fashion, to denote a numerically preponderate and politically significant Maratha-Kunbi caste grouping within the region.3 This modification in the category’s content and meaning meant the Maratha caste had principal claim to both the region’s proud pre-colonial history and its future political trajectory. Simultaneously, their demographic weight meant that they also anticipated dominating access to state jobs, resources and wealth in the new province, at the expense of low status non-Brahman and Dalit communities. This book analyses how these understandings of belonging and citizenship inflected the attitudes and actions of the late colonial and early postcolonial state in western India, in the context of persistent demands for linguistic reorganisation. It outlines how such demands, as well as resistance to them, were shaped by manifest ideas about democratic governance, as India was gradually democratised in the decades between the First World War and independence.

The setting The demand for the creation of Samyukta (‘united’) Maharashtra had first emerged in the context of growing anticipation of a forthcoming independence from British colonial rule. The expectancy of autonomy, democracy, self-government, ‘Swaraj’, ‘Pakistan’ and other ‘various vocabularies of freedom in circulation’ were critical to the formulation of a multiplicity of contrasting and overlapping ideas about the future status of the various peoples of South Asia, within, as of yet, ill-defined and shapeless nation-state(s).4 And this diverse assortment of demands, visions and ‘ideas of India’5 continued to prevail in the aftermath of the achievement of independence and the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 – this was indeed, as the title of Vazira Zamindar’s 2007 monograph has suggested, a ‘long partition’.6 This book therefore adheres to the current trend amongst historians of South Asia, to traverse the colonial/postcolonial divide and enter a domain previously the preserve of political and social scientists. One particular subset of this scholarship has focused upon the events of independence and partition, noting how the new postcolonial Indian government had to establish and assert its legitimacy and integrity, delineate its territorial boundaries, control the transfer of populations and conceptualise who constituted its citizenry, all within a prevailing atmosphere of insecurity and flux.7 Over the course of the next decade, attempts to resettle and rehabilitate huge numbers of Hindu and Sikh refugees were accompanied by suspicions over the loyalties of Muslims who had either chosen, or been forced by circumstances, to remain behind. With state representatives casting doubt on their patriotic devotion, and considered ‘fifthcolumnists’ in the employ of an aggressive and menacing Pakistan, Muslims in India quickly came to be seen as ‘the most excluded members in the whole body of Indian citizenry’.8 In this context, debates on democracy, secularism, citizenship and belonging in the immediate post-independence years have come to be

Introduction 3 principally constructed along the lines of religion, a tendency captured in the evocative title of Gyanendra Pandey’s essay, ‘Can a Muslim be an Indian?’9 Yet, if we look beyond those parts of the subcontinent that were directly partitioned, we can discern another, alternative perspective on partition in addition to this ‘Hindu-Muslim Question’. Pakistan was only one manifestation of a variety of demands for freedom, autonomy and self-government that were strengthened by the increased likelihood and then achievement of independence – there was nothing inevitable about its territorial distinctiveness and separate sovereignty. In fact, the Muslim League leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah actually sought to secure Muslim interests within India in a loose con-federal arrangement based upon Hindu-Muslim parity at the centre.10 For Ayesha Jalal, Pakistan was a ‘bargaining chip’ in Jinnah’s efforts to be recognised as the ‘sole spokesman’ of India’s Muslims – not only in the eyes of the British, but equally amongst Muslims themselves. The demand served as a political device through which to reorient Muslim allegiances in the Muslim-majority provinces of Punjab, Bengal and elsewhere, away from (often inter-communal) provincial parties and towards religious identity politics and the League instead. Jinnah intentionally ‘avoided giving the demand a precise definition, leaving the League’s followers to make of it what they wished’.11 Jalal’s work thus begins to suggest that, It is critical also to bring into the narrative the British devolution of power to the provinces in the period after 1919, a process that had as much influence on the dynamics of the debates leading to partition as did an earlier British policy of “divide and rule” tied to religion.12 The support proffered by the Bengali Premier, Fazlul Huq, for the Muslim League’s 1940 Lahore Resolution, for example, was actually based around a pluralised conception of autonomous and sovereign ‘independent states’, rather than a singular ‘Pakistan’. It thus ‘amounted to more provincial autonomy than the [1935 Government of India] Act had so far provided, for it gave independence not only from the central government but also from the central policy of the Muslim League’.13 Huq and other Bengali Muslim politicians and thinkers drew upon and understood the idea of Pakistan as emblematic of wider demands for cultural autonomy and ‘minority’ rights. In this conception, Pakistan and the Lahore Resolution were lauded for both recognising the reality of India as a collection of various groups and communities, rather than one unified nation, and simultaneously providing a means to counter the prospect of high-caste, north Indian Hindu majoritarianism within a heavily centralised government in postcolonial India. Abul Kalam Shamsuddin, a prominent journalist and literary figure, and member of the East Pakistan Renaissance Society, for example, suggested Pakistan meant a ‘struggle for freedom not just for one desh [native land; region; nation], but for many deshes, many jatis [caste in the sense of a specific named birth-group], as India is a large federation of jatis’.14 By referring to jatis, Shamsuddin also raised the possibility of the idea of Pakistan as being equally applicable to other communities defined on a

4

Introduction

caste, linguistic or religious basis. In this utopian vision, the shift in emphasis away from minorities and majorities and towards a decentralised political federation based on units constituted by distinct religions, languages, castes and ethnicities seemed to render number insignificant to India’s political future and undermine the potential threat of high-caste Hindu hegemony. As such, the idea of Pakistan could inspire other visions of India’s federal and fragmented political future. If we look beyond the northeast and northwest, we can trace similar manifestations of regional sentiment in more novel arenas within India, which demonstrate the broader, more comprehensive impact of independence and partition. Semiautonomous princely rulers in the relatively more territorially viable states of Bhopal, Hyderabad, Kashmir and Travancore began to plan for their own separate nationhood, opening up diplomatic ties with European and North American states.15 Outbreaks of violence and popular resistance ensured that military force was resorted to in Hyderabad, Junagadh and Kashmir to ensure their accession to the Indian Union. Beyond the princely states, other conceptualisations of freedom and democracy prevailed. The Rajaji formula of 1942, for example, fashioned by C. Rajagopalachari, the Madras-based Gandhian Congress leader, advocated permitting the Muslim-majority provinces of the northeast and northwest the option to go their own way. But as a committed Tamil of southern India, Rajaji’s plan also sought to cut down the political, demographic and cultural weightage of the north in comparison to the south. The plan was supported by leaders of the Dravidian movement as evidence of the need for autonomy from the troubles and demands of the north.16 In fact, the leader of the non-Brahman movement in south India, E. V. Ramaswami Naicker, drew upon the idea of Pakistan to demand the creation of ‘Dravidasthan’ in this part of the subcontinent. Equally, B. R. Ambedkar, the famous Dalit leader, also began to argue for the creation of separate Dalit settlements, which would constitute ‘Dalitsthan’.17 Demands for separate homelands were attempts to have Dravidians and Dalits recognised, like Muslims, as separate elements within the national life of India. Despite the attempts of some Muslims to deny the significance of number to India’s future constitutional makeup, the Pakistan demand was in part propagated and accepted on the basis that Muslims, while constituting a numerical minority in the subcontinent as a whole, were also a majority in large parts of it. After 1940, Jinnah repeatedly emphasised that Pakistan already existed in British India, and pointed to the Muslim-majority provinces of the northeast and northwest as proof of this claim.18 Equally, the partitions of Punjab and Bengal in August 1947 were based predominantly on a territorial demarcation between ‘Muslim-majority’ and ‘Hindu-majority’ areas. The continuing significance of number had important implications for India’s Dalits, particularly as it came to be linked to territory at the moment of postcolonial transition. Dalits nowhere constituted a majority of the population, but were widely dispersed throughout the various administrative divisions within the subcontinent. This explains the proposed schemes of resettlement and physical separation envisaged by Ambedkar and other Dalit leaders during the 1940s and 1950s. Separation and resettlement would allow Dalits to escape the ‘tyranny of the majority’, not only in the national life of India, but also within

Introduction 5 provincial politics. In addition to the perceived threat of the Hindu majority, then, Ambedkar was equally concerned about the spectres of both Muslim majoritarianism in a prospective Pakistan, and Maratha majoritarianism in a reorganised Maharashtra.19 These mutual concerns begin to suggest some of the commonalities evident within the coterminous demands for a Muslim homeland and a Marathispeaking province. In fact, both Pakistan and Samyukta Maharashtra were premised and found fruition (unlike the impossibility of the demand for ‘Dalitsthan’) on the basis of the majority status of particular ‘communities’ (Muslims and Marathas/Marathi speakers) in certain parts of the subcontinent. As the next chapter reveals, the idea of the bahujan samaj (‘people in the majority’), for example, was crucial to the emergence of a vocal Maharashtrian non-Brahman movement in late nineteenthcentury western India, which differentiated non-Brahmans from an unrepresentative and ‘alien’ Brahman and Gujarati elite. Both Pakistan and Samyukta Maharashtra could also be envisaged as demands for the creation of semi-autonomous units within a federally structured Indian Union. Chapter 3 demonstrates how leading proponents of a unilingual Marathi-speaking province, such as the noted Maharashtrian economist D. R. Gadgil, envisaged a federal solution for India, capable of encompassing both the Pakistan demand and linguistic reorganisation. Equally, both demands engaged with an idea of democratic governance constituted on the basis of majority rule, in which the provincial government would provide jobs, funds and services in a way that served the interests of the province’s majority community. Chapters 4 and 5 demonstrate how these notions of democratic majoritarianism were articulated in western India, in the context of bureaucratic reservations in the provincial services and the selection of Congress candidates ahead of provincial elections. In turn, this vision of democracy could also inform exclusivist notions of belonging, which demarcated all other inhabitants within the province as outsiders and aliens and precluded multilingual and syncretic religious initiatives and practices. Chapter 6 notes how the vernacular languages and dialects of adivasi communities in western India came to be supplanted at the 1951 Census by a new, straightforward, yet artificial dichotomy between Gujarati and Marathi speakers, in the context of an impending linguistic reorganisation. This reflected a similar attempt to ascertain the religious affinities of adivasis in the context of the 1941 Census in Bengal and Punjab, ahead of a comparable process of boundary demarcation between religious communities in these provinces. Noting the similarities between the movement for Maharashtra and the demand for Pakistan in this frame allows us to view the 1947 partition as one (paradigmatic) example of an array of demands for autonomy and statehood that were conceived during the transition to independence. These include the demands for linguistic reorganisation of provincial administrative boundaries in the south and west of India. This book therefore provides a broadened outlook upon independence and partition, as well as their implications for notions of belonging, citizenship and democracy in postcolonial South Asia. The majority of previous scholarship on this gradual democratic transition has focused primarily on the

6

Introduction

implications of boundary demarcation, refugee rehabilitation and Muslim loyalties in northern India, thereby corroborating the argument of David Washbrook, who has pointed out that South Asian histories of ‘the whole’ have invariably focused on Bengal and the Gangetic valley.20 Although there have been compelling reasons for privileging such perspectives, ultimately tied into dominant narratives of nationalism, partition and religious conflict, there are also many benefits to exploring the gradual advent of democracy and democratic governance beyond the north, particularly in a country as large and diverse as India. The linguistic reorganisation of provincial administrative boundaries during the 1950s has received scant attention in the most recent historical scholarship on partition and its postcolonial implications.21 When linguistic reorganisation has been considered elsewhere, often by political and social scientists in a rather different context, it has tended to be treated quite separately to independence and partition.22 By integrating these two approaches, this book expands our understanding of the implications of the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial in a relatively understudied geographical region of the subcontinent. The contemporary province of Maharashtra, according to the 2011 Census, is the second most populous province in India, and of comparable demographic size to Mexico (the eleventh largest country in terms of population in the world) with a population of over 112 million people.23 Situated on the western side of the southern peninsula of the Indian Union, it can be divided into three distinct regions, which reflect the historical separation of Marathi speakers into different provinces and princely states under the British Raj. Vidarbha, situated in the east of the contemporary province, previously made up part of the Central Provinces, whilst Marathwada was an erstwhile dominion of the semi-autonomous Nizam (or princely ruler) of Hyderabad. But it is upon western Maharashtra, the former Marathi-speaking districts of Bombay Province, and the centre of the Samyukta Maharashtra movement, which this book concentrates. In 1931, Marathi speakers comprised 11.1 million of the 26.6 million inhabitants of the Bombay Presidency (including the princely states), primarily residing in the central districts of East and West Khandesh, Nasik, Ahmadnagar, Poona, Satara and Sholapur; the coastal districts of Thana, Kolaba and Ratnagiri; the city of Bombay; the princely states and tribal chiefdoms of Kolhapur and the Dangs; and the southern district of Belgaum.24 Besides a common language, the relative homogeneity of these districts was also reflected in terms of caste and, in particular, the exclusive preponderance of the Maratha-Kunbi caste cluster, which made up the majority of the rural Marathi-speaking community.25 Another 4.9 million of Bombay province’s inhabitants were classified as Gujarati speakers, and mainly resided in the province’s northern districts where the Patidar-Kanbi caste cluster predominated. A further 3.2 million Kannada speakers were found in the southern districts of the province, where the Lingayat caste comprised a large proportion of the population.26 Muslims, treated as a homogeneous bloc despite their sectarian, linguistic and class differences, constituted only 970,886, or less than 8 per cent of the total population in the Marathi- and Kannada-speaking central and southern districts of Bombay.27 It was at the juncture between supposedly homogenous

Introduction 7 language and caste communities, as well as the myriad particularistic and fragmentary identities that frequently cut across and problematised them, through which notions of democracy, belonging and citizenship were primarily constituted in late colonial and early postcolonial western India.

Conceptualising citizenship Many conventional theories of citizenship, as Joya Chatterji has recently noted, tend ‘to locate the origins of modern notions of citizenship at the conjuncture of political, intellectual, and legal currents in early modern Europe’.28 In these hypotheses, citizenship is also inextricably linked to, and derived from, the concomitant emergence of nationalism and the modern nation-state. For Rogers Brubaker, citizenship in France and Germany was shaped by their own nationalist movements: generally speaking, French citizenship is deemed ‘civic’ and ‘republican’ in nature, as a consequence of the decisive events of 1789–1793; whilst German citizenship is ‘ethnic’, as an upshot of German unification in 1871 around a common linguistic medium.29 The legal status of citizenship has thus come to be conventionally approached around the binary of jus soli (an inclusive interpretation based upon birth and residence) and jus sanguinus (an exclusive interpretation based upon ethnicity and descent), with a nation deemed to adhere to one principle or the other. More recently, this delineation of two dichotomised approaches has been undermined by the recognition that, ‘In practice, however, the pure type of either [the jus soli or the jus sanguinus] principle is rare, with the rules governing citizenship by marriage or naturalisation complicating this neat delineation’.30 Patrick Weil, for example, has highlighted how the French government has actually been prepared to deviate and adopt more exclusive policies on nationality and belonging at particular historical moments since 1789.31 Similarly, in the global south, many of the older, conventional approaches have seen citizenship as being based around, or having incorporated a mixture of, these models and approaches emanating from the West at the moment of postcolonial transition. In the seminal work of T. H. Marshall, citizenship in Britain was seen to emerge as part of a gradual, staged and evolutionary process, which passed from ‘civil’ liberties, included the achievement of ‘political’ privileges, and culminated in the provision of ‘social’ rights for all.32 By contrast, in many of the former colonies of Asia, Africa and Latin America, citizenship was considered to have appeared fully-formed, inclusive and universal from the outset, at least in theoretical/ constitutional intent, as a concatenate of the achievement of independence – a perception that this book, as we shall see momentarily, will critique. Valerian Rodrigues, for example, has suggested that the underlying imperatives of Indian citizenship were based upon ‘non-preference to any community and [were] inclusive of all communities. The fact of Partition . . . was not allowed to affect the understanding and demarcation of citizenship. If anything, it made the Constituent Assembly deeply sensitive to issues of group affiliation’.33 In this scholarship, it is only the inability of postcolonial governments to live up to the liberal principles that were supposedly enshrined within their constitution that has inhibited the

8

Introduction

enactment of truly universal citizenship practices. Similarly, James Holston has criticised ‘the substantive distribution of . . . rights . . . to those deemed citizens’ in Brazil, characterising these failures as ‘de facto deprivations of “inclusive” but “inegalitarian citizenship”’.34 Such approaches seem to suggest that ‘earlier exclusions [from citizenship are only] . . . temporary glitches in a perfectible, everexpanding pluralist system’.35 In reality, the formal codification of citizenship in South Asia actually prioritised more exclusive forms. Contradicting Rodrigues’s argument, politicians’ views on citizenship in India and Pakistan came to be influenced by the mass migrations that characterised the partition process during the late 1940s and early 1950s. In this telling, fairly straightforward conceptualisations of citizenship based on birth, which drew upon British domestic and imperial paradigms and were commonplace amongst the leaders and lawmakers of both prospective nation-states before August 1947, came to be ‘complicated by the problematic status, and the decisive actions, of refugees, emigrants, and stayers on’ after independence.36 As a consequence, the position and loyalties of religious minorities within this new citizenship regime also came under intense scrutiny. Rochana Bajpai, for example, has argued that the transition from colonial rule to independent citizenship marked a ‘moment of containment’ for minority rights, in which separate political and bureaucratic safeguards for Muslims (and most other minority communities) were abolished.37 For Shabnum Tejani, this was indicative of a wider rhetorical shift in the Constituent Assembly debates, in which the ‘communal problem’ was considered effectively solved by partition and the creation of Pakistan, and the question of citizenship in a secular Indian state could now be de-linked from minority protection.38 By 1955, when India’s citizenship laws were finally codified, Muslims who had at any point migrated to or been domiciled in Pakistan after partition were denied the status of Indian citizens. As the processes and discussions that lay behind its formal codification in South Asia demonstrate, citizenship was not enacted in a vacuum free from societal tensions and concerns – rather, ordinary and everyday perceptions effected, moulded and reconstituted, in entirely novel directions, the universal premises upon which a European-derived citizenship was supposedly based. In turn, this helps support the claim that citizenship is not only a ‘thin’ legal status, but might also be understood as both a ‘thick’ set of practices and an expression of belonging.39 For South Asians in the late colonial and early postcolonial period, citizenship was understood as the performance of a variety of rights, arising predominantly from interactions between governments and administrative officials, on the one hand, and individuals and groups drawn from wider society, on the other. Appeals for political representation, employment in government service, and the protection afforded to one’s own language, which constitute the subject matter of this book’s substantive chapters, might all be seen as claims and articulations of citizenship. Such perspectives require us to complicate citizenship still further, as it was not invoked solely in reference to nationalism and the nation-state, an approach that ‘tends to close down the possibility of alternative emotional ties’.40 By thinking about the relationship between citizenship and belonging instead, we are better placed to

Introduction 9 think about the ‘many simultaneous, competing and overlapping notions of belonging in circulation’, which not only better correspond to the myriad vocabularies of freedom in circulation at the moment of independence, but which also in turn each underpin ‘a different set of prescriptions for government policy’.41 In this sense, If belonging signifies a politicised claim to a group’s or an individual’s position in a particular space, then citizenship might be regarded as the performance of that sense of belonging through the exercise of rights and the demand for services from the state.42 During the last couple of decades or so, the interest of political and social scientists in citizenship has been reignited by the impact of neo-liberalism and the increasingly interconnected nature of the global economy. Citizenship has been reconceptualised around an international and ‘cosmopolitan’ framework, which circumvents the efficacy of the nation as the only arena through which citizenship can be enacted. This is not to point towards the demise of the nation-state – indeed, the universalism of global citizenship can serve as a kind of ‘Trojan horse’ for more selective interests and prerogatives, oft defined on a nationalistic basis – but to note the ‘flexible’ nature of citizenship, to borrow Aihwa Ong’s helpful phrase, in which citizenship can be performed in a variety of different spatial locations, from the local to the transnational.43 In some ways, then, the increased sense of a global, ‘moral’ citizenship has served to ‘unhinge’ it from the nation-state as its most obvious referent. In a colonial/postcolonial setting such as South Asia, the recent focus amongst historians of empire upon formulations of ‘imperial citizenship’ is also particularly prescient. Focusing on the ‘languages of citizenship’ evident within the writings, speeches and petitions of such Indian luminaries as Dadabhai Naoroji, Surendranath Banerjea, Cornelia Sarabji and M. K. Gandhi, Sukanya Banerjee has demonstrated how ‘the British Empire itself provided the ground for claiming citizenship even as the thrust of these claims implicitly critiques British colonial practices’.44 This book thus draws upon the utility of transnational and imperial approaches to citizenship, noting how this scholarship elucidates its fluctuating nature and its application in alternative spatial arenas.45 But it focuses more heavily on how, in a late colonial/early postcolonial South Asian context, the province was ideally located to act as an equally prescient space for alternative articulations of belonging and citizenship, even more so after the ‘provincialisation’ of political power under the 1919 Government of India Act. The Act brought greater political autonomy to the provincial units of British India, and at the same time bolstered Indian representation in the provincial bureaucracy, legislature and executive. As a consequence, the province emerged as a natural unit of loyalty and allegiance, particularly when it provided institutionalised advantages to how particular groups and individuals were able to claim and exercise citizenship rights. These inbuilt advantages also explain why demands emerged for provincial reorganisation at this juncture, as different groups clamoured for their own separate administrative space.46 Similarly, provincialised notions of belonging and citizenship became imperative

10

Introduction

in a context where independence was frequently envisaged as a harbinger of greater provincial autonomy. Again, this is not to dismiss the utility and continuing significance of larger conceptualisations of national citizenship. Provincial notions of belonging and citizenship did not displace, but were part of wider debates about ‘Indianness’, often helping to shape and being informed by ideas about who belonged in India.47 As Chapter 3 demonstrates, the proponents of Samyukta Maharashtra did not envisage a regional sense of Maharashtrian-ness as supplanting a wider notion of belonging to India, but instead believed that provincial belonging would actually augment loyalty to the larger nation. Claims to citizenship and belonging in India, whether at the national or provincial level, were also shaped by older colonial stereotypes about the prevailing significance of ‘community’ in South Asian societies. As Chapter 2 demonstrates, community identities were politicised as a consequence of an expanding franchise and the gradual democratisation of representative government. British assumptions about Indian society as divided between Hindu majority and Muslim minority informed a range of policymaking decisions, including the provision of separate electorates for Muslims from 1909. These decisions impacted upon the manifest articulations, conceptualisations and claims evident in debates about belonging and citizenship ahead of independence. During the Constituent Assembly debates in January 1947, for example, the Congressman G. B. Pant bemoaned the fact that Indians had ‘an unwholesome habit of thinking in communities’ rather than in terms of individual citizenship, as a consequence of separate electorates and the reservation of seats on the former basis.48 Yet Pant’s position, which advocated a universal liberalism based around the individual citizen, was also criticised as implicitly favouring the interests of India’s Hindu majority. Whilst these ideas about belonging and citizenship were primarily articulated in a religious idiom at the all-India level and in the provinces of the north during this period, the relative paucity of the Muslim population in much of rural Maharashtra meant that claims to citizenship and belonging here were more frequently conceptualised through alternative markers of difference. This book suggests that although community was privileged above the individual in western India, too, caste and language emerged as equally significant forms through which citizenship and belonging were framed, exercised and claimed. Equally, the formal codification of citizenship at independence should not detract from the longer processes through which it was refracted during the interwar years, especially against a backdrop of gradual democratisation in British India.49

Democracy, state and society As Taylor Sherman has recently noted, ‘Assertions of belonging and performances of citizenship operated within parameters set by conceptions of secularism and democracy’.50 Drawing upon her work, this book looks to examine the ways in which concepts of democracy (and secularism) were comprehended and employed at the moment of postcolonial transition. In one sense, democracy and secularism could be conceived in terms of the recognition of individual rights and state

Introduction 11 impartiality towards its citizens’ religious affiliations. This was primarily an understanding of democracy as non-discrimination and served as one element of the ‘modernising’ imperatives of the Nehruvian state, in their efforts to transform what they perceived to be a ‘backward’ society still captivated by the ‘primordial’ identities of religion, sect and caste. For a broad cross-section of scholars working on India, this understanding of democracy was considered to be the preserve of a small, isolated and primarily English-speaking elite, who were unable to exercise cultural leadership over wider Indian society. Whilst the wider project of modernisation was initially invested with utopian hopes and ambitions by the liberal elite in the immediate postcolonial period, Partha Chatterjee has noted how, ‘the widening of the arena of political mobilisation, prompted by electoral considerations and often only for electoral ends . . . has caused much discomfort and apprehension in progressive circles in recent years’.51 However, the way in which these points about contemporary South Asian politics are framed has the unfortunate tendency of reinforcing a dichotomy between Nehruvian rule, on the one hand, and India’s growing crisis of governability under the premiership of Indira Gandhi and her successors, on the other.52 In this telling, Nehru is seen as capable of presenting the modernising project as the will of the people, by intertwining state initiative and electoral approval. By exploring a set of issues related to linguistic reorganisation in western India, an alternative sketch of Nehru and the Nehruvian state emerges, which instead problematises the extent of their influence. Central to this picture is complicating a straightforward, uniform depiction of both the state and the Congress organisation by examining the heterogeneity of their makeup. Nehru and the small cadre of like-minded people at the centre in New Delhi did not supervise the everyday operation of government and Congress activities in the provinces. In Bombay, B. G. Kher served as Chief Minister for the first five years after independence, and was followed by Morarji Desai, who held the post until India’s second general elections in 1957. Meanwhile, the Bombay Provincial Congress Committee (PCC), which represented the party and coordinated its affairs in Bombay City, was under the presidency of S. K. Patil, whilst the Maharashtra PCC was controlled by B. S. Hiray for much of this period. These men had their own initiatives and agendas (Hiray, for example, supported the movement for Samyukta Maharashtra), which did not always neatly square with the ‘progressive’ ideals and values of Nehru and his followers. Nehru and others at the centre only intermittently intervened in Bombay’s affairs, on occasions when particular individuals or groups made extraordinary appeals to them and the values they supposedly represented, in an effort to override the actions of politicians and state representatives in the province. This picture of the early postcolonial state is complicated still further if we consider its everyday encounters, interactions and manifestations for the ordinary citizen. Rather than treating the state as an elite and autonomous institution distinct from the rest of society, this book utilises the theoretical frameworks employed by anthropologists working on the nature of the ‘everyday state’ in contemporary India. As Chris Fuller and John Harriss have demonstrated, the state is not an

12

Introduction

exotic entity to which society has no recourse, but for many ordinary Indians is ‘banal, mundane and routinised’.53 Akhil Gupta, meanwhile, in trying to collapse the distinction between the state and society in their everyday encounters, has described the likelihood of finding bureaucratic officials at roadside tea-stalls and at their homes, rather than in their offices.54 These approaches have wider utility when reflecting on the late colonial/early postcolonial period. During the interwar years, the gradual advent of liberal democracy had also come to be tied up with demands for the ‘Indianisation’ of key branches of the state. As a result, the state itself came to be constituted by powerful social forces, with different ideas about state power and the allocation of resources within it. Civil servants, drawn from amongst the very same public that they were expected to impartially preside over, were often subject to the same beliefs, concerns and exigencies. They could be put under pressure by certain sub-sections of local society, whose members cajoled, influenced or even threatened these officials to come to particular decisions, or to redirect resources in their favour.55 In the process, local bureaucrats frequently contravened the central directives and principles of Nehruvianism. Rather than a homogeneous body speaking with one voice, the state itself is a disaggregated and contested entity, incapable of standing apart from political negotiations over such issues as provincial reorganisation, bureaucratic reservations and census enumeration – the subject matter of this book. This has important implications for our exploration of the influence of democracy as non-discrimination. The understanding of democracy shared by Nehru and a small cadre of likeminded people at the centre did not always permeate the provincial, district and local levels of the state in Bombay. In fact, Nehru’s own vision of democratic conduct was more complicated and ambiguous when it encountered the continuing prevalence of community identities, as Chapter 4 points out. This again owes much to the critical reforms of the interwar period, when longstanding ideas about the propensity of Indians to think and organise on the basis of distinct caste, linguistic and religious ‘communities’, first espoused by nineteenth-century ethnologists and administrators, came to be politicised by the colonial state.56 Rather than straightforwardly replicating Western liberal paradigms about the individual rights-bearing citizen, the introduction of democratic forms, institutions and practices at the provincial level and below instead entrenched the importance of community as constituency, with these constituencies coming to be defined on the basis of their majority and minority status.57 In this context, democracy as non-discrimination often had less purchase at the everyday level, and community came to mediate access to government privileges on the basis of alternative interpretations of democratic governance. One alternative interpretation linked democratic conduct to a form of majoritarianism, in which democracy would serve the interests of the ‘majority’ community. In this telling, democracy was about the counting of heads on a communal basis. Another common perception envisaged democracy as an exercise in commensuration, in which the state would provide separate representation to communities who felt threatened by the introduction of universal suffrage. Such demands for equalisation also rendered community politically consequential. Across much of India, the intersection between democracy, number and community was primarily envisaged through a religious idiom. Notions of democratic

Introduction 13 majoritarianism were most frequently conflated with the idea of a natural Hindu majority. Meanwhile, democracy as both commensuration and non-discrimination were primarily discussed as appropriate means through which Muslims could make demands upon the late colonial and postcolonial Indian governments. Yet, these understandings of democracy could also be related to other manifestations of community at alternative scales of analysis. In Bombay, ideas about democratic majoritarianism could be employed on the basis of the majority status of particular caste (i.e. ‘Maratha’) or linguistic (i.e. ‘Marathi-speaking’) groups within certain districts, and in anticipation of the creation of a new Marathi-speaking province. This particular sense of democracy informed exclusive understandings of belonging and citizenship, in which Samyukta Maharashtra would provide a homeland to protect the interests of Marathas and/or Marathi speakers alone. In turn, other communities, such as Gujarati speakers and Dalits, turned to democracy as either non-discrimination and/or commensuration to counter these claims. The former depiction of democratic conduct, based around ignoring the different markers of community amongst its citizens, tended to be synonymous with more homogeneous, inclusivist notions of belonging, and instead emphasised a larger Indian identity. By tracing the applicability of community to ideas about democracy in the local machinations between the ‘everyday state’ and society, this book does not attempt to draw a broad theoretical disjunction between corrupt, nepotistic and communityoriented lower-level bureaucratic customs and the aloof, impartial and ultimately accountable practices supposedly embodied by the higher echelons of the services.58 As William Gould has demonstrated, these perpetuate older colonial assumptions about the ‘corruptibility’ and untrustworthiness of the ‘inferior’, Indian-manned levels of the administration in direct comparison to the European governmental traditions of the ‘heaven-born’ all-India Indian Civil Service (ICS).59 Rather than a manifestation of ‘primordial’ sentiment or the essential corruptibility of the lower levels of the bureaucracy, the relevance of community in the mediation of democracy and citizenship was instead a product of aforementioned ‘customs of governance’ introduced by the colonial state during the interwar years at the everyday level.60 Meanwhile, the self-association of the central state with nondiscrimination, cosmopolitanism and modernisation was often actually a means of consolidating more parochial group interests. As Akhil Gupta argues, [L]ower-level officials are only one link in a chain of corrupt practices that extends to the apex of state organisations and reaches far beyond them to electoral politics. . . . The difference is that whereas higher-level state officials raise large sums from relatively few people who can afford to pay it to them, lower-level officials collect it in small figures and on a daily basis from a very large number of people. It is for this reason that corruption is so much more visible at the lower levels.61 Despite the increasingly frequent revelations of malfeasance at the apex of governance in India, some individual citizens have continued to appeal to what Thomas Blom Hansen has called the state’s ‘mythic’ or ‘sublime’ dimensions, whether these are represented by its supposedly liberal constitutional premises, its

14

Introduction

communal impartiality or its ‘accountability’ in its conduct towards the Indian public.62 We have already seen how Nehru and others at the centre on occasion interfered in provincial politics and government on the basis of these extraordinary appeals. The state can thus be held to account for not living up to its stated morals and principles. At important moments it served the interests of particular groups of people in western India to imagine what Gupta has called a ‘hierarchical vision of the state’, in which ‘corrupt’ local representatives are contrasted with ‘benevolent’ and ‘charitable’ elements within its higher echelons, which these groups are then able to appeal to for the redress of their grievances and the protection of their rights.63 This undermines the argument that democracy as non-discrimination remained the sole preserve of a distant and distinct elite, even if there were often particular reasons why individuals might have engaged with such rhetoric. At opportune moments, it served as a useful strategy to counter discrimination in the allocation of resources to particular, privileged communities. ––––– The next chapter of this book explores in greater detail the reasons why community came to be politicised by both colonial administrators and indigenous political actors during the interwar period. It focuses in particular on the gradual emergence of a regionally specific Maratha majoritarianism, which was based on their preponderance within Marathi-speaking districts, and which came to replace the demands for affirmative action for Marathas on the basis of their ‘backwardness’. These demands emerged as a consequence of the gradual democratisation of the political process in western India, whereby the counting of heads was deemed increasingly important. In this sense, it paralleled a coterminous shift towards emphasising the linkages between number, territory and community evident within certain conceptualisations of the Pakistan demand, particularly in Muslim-majority provinces such as Punjab and Bengal. Equally, this new position on democratic conduct undermined an older, more egalitarian alliance established between Marathas, other non-Brahman castes and Dalits, organised in antipathy to Brahman dominance, and evident within Phule’s idea of the bahujan samaj (‘people in the majority’). In fact, the concern expressed about reservations for Dalits by both Marathas at the provincial level and Hindus at the all-India level helped inform an uneasy alliance between Brahmans and Marathas within the Congress Party at this time. It was in this context that references to a shared language and regional history emerged, based around the stereotypical ‘Marathi manus’ (‘Marathi man’). Capable of encompassing both Brahmans and non-Brahmans, these shared ideas about regional affinity served as a precursor to the demand for Samyukta Maharashtra. Debates about the nature of this demand, as well as the viability of linguistic reorganisation more broadly during the late 1940s and early 1950s, form the substance of Chapter 3. In these discussions, the spectre of partition loomed large. Supporters of a Marathi-speaking province relied on a majoritarian conception of democracy, premised on both exclusivist ideas about linguistic belonging and a homogeneous and essentialised portrayal of a united Marathi-speaking community, which both

Introduction 15 paralleled and replicated aspects of the Pakistan demand. In fact, Ambedkar noted the significance of territory and number as being essential to both demands, and was perturbed by the potential threat the creation of Samyukta Maharashtra and Pakistan posed to the position of minorities. Congressmen at the centre, meanwhile, drawing upon Pakistan as a paradigmatic example, argued that the creation of Maharashtra would privilege the politics of language and foreshadow a further ‘balkanisation’ of the larger Indian nation. The second half of the book focuses on some of the intricacies involved in Congress candidate selection, bureaucratic reservations, census enumeration and boundary demarcation, in the context of the wider discussion points raised in the preceding chapters. Chapter 4 primarily examines how candidates were selected by the PCCs in Bombay in the context of the 1951–1952 elections, the first to be held under a universal franchise in an independent India. It suggests that the nomination of candidates was considered a suitable opportunity for politicians and the wider public to engage with and debate ideas about suitable democratic conduct and forms of representative government within India’s nascent democracy. Although the results of the election might appear to be a vindication of Nehruvian values and ideals, the petitions and memorials submitted by spurned Congressmen still pointed towards the continuing significance of community in the selection process. The next chapter moves on to considering forms of affirmative action in the late colonial and early postcolonial provincial administration. In the middle and lower tiers of Bombay’s bureaucracy, both Congress and colonial governments looked to balance different interests on the basis of provincial demographics. For the purposes of reservation, communities were organised into three, broadly defined classes – ‘Advanced’, ‘Intermediate’ and ‘Backward’. This arbitrary division ensured that the provision of representative safeguards precluded some and benefited others, as numerically preponderate Marathas came to dominate the bureaucracy in predominantly Marathi-speaking districts, particularly at the expense of other ‘Intermediate’ (e.g. non-Brahman and Muslim) communities. The final chapter reflects on the process of census enumeration and classification of language, which had become critical in the context of linguistic reorganisation and boundary demarcation in western India. Concentrating on those borderland areas with either sizeable populations of different linguistic communities, or where the linguistic affinities of a particular group were unclear, it reveals how rumours emerged that the enumerators were manipulating the data for political purposes. This contravened the emphasis on state impartiality and blindness to an individual’s communal affinities that was articulated by both Nehru at the centre and Kher in the province in the build-up to census operations. But it also had a palpable impact upon the position of minority communities, with the number of adivasis (‘tribals’) speaking vernacular languages declining in the census returns, at the expense of official provincial languages. By uncovering the everyday machinations between the state and society in western India during the moment of postcolonial transition, this book provides a number of important insights into assertions and performances of citizenship and belonging, particularly as they encountered and engaged with different

16

Introduction

conceptions of democratic conduct. In doing so, it emphasises the significance of the interwar period, in which a gradual process of democratisation was also marked by the continuing importance of community, albeit now reimagined as political constituency and linked to number and territory. It was such linkages that informed the emergence of the Samyukta Maharashtra demand in western India, which was principally premised on a majoritarian understanding of democracy. This demand for the creation of a Marathi-speaking province is also indicative of the various visions of independent India’s political future that were in contemporary circulation amongst politicians, state administrators and the wider public. Rather than treating partition as a standalone event, this book suggests that the idea of Pakistan might be considered as one manifestation of wider vocabularies of sub-national autonomy and regional sentiment, which were also evident in the calls for linguistic reorganisation in southern and western India.

Notes 1 Director of Publicity, Government of Maharashtra, Maharashtra State Is Launched: An Artist’s Review of the Events That Marked the Formation of the State April 27–May 1, 1960, Bombay: Rekha Publications, 1960; ‘Maharashtra Resurgent’, Blitz (Bombay), 23 April 1960. 2 Samyukta Maharashtra Parishad, Reorganisation of States in India with Particular Reference to the Formation of Maharashtra, Bombay: Topiwalla Mansion, 1954, p. 6. 3 Prachi Deshpande, ‘Caste as Maratha: Social Categories, Colonial Policy and Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Maharashtra’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review [henceforth IESHR], 41.1 (2004), 7–32. 4 Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan, London: Yale University Press, 2007, p. 5; see also, Sugata Bose, ‘Nation as Mother: Representations and Contestations of “India” in Bengali Literature and Culture’, in Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India, ed. by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 50–75 (pp. 70–75). 5 Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India, London: Penguin, 1999. 6 Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. 7 Khan, The Great Partition; Ian Talbot, ‘Punjabi Refugees’ Rehabilitation and the Indian State: Discourses, Denials and Dissonances’, Modern Asian Studies [henceforth MAS], 45 (2011), 109–130; Zamindar, The Long Partition; Sarah Ansari, Life after Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh, 1947–1962, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007; William Gould, Taylor C. Sherman, and Sarah Ansari, ‘The Flux of the Matter: Loyalty, Corruption and the Everyday State in the Post-Partition Government Services of India and Pakistan’, Past and Present, 219 (2013), 237–279; Uditi Sen, ‘The Myths Refugees Live By: Memory and History in the Making of Bengali Refugee Identity’, MAS, 48 (2014), 37–76. 8 Ornit Shani, ‘Conceptions of Citizenship in India and the “Muslim Question”’, MAS, 44 (2010), 145 (Abstract). See also, Taylor Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India: Negotiating Citizenship in Postcolonial Hyderabad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 9 Gyanendra Pandey, ‘Can a Muslim be an Indian?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 41 (1999), 608–629. 10 Asim Roy, ‘Reviews: The High Politics of India’s Partition: The Revisionist Perspective’, MAS, 24 (1990), 385–408 (pp. 391, 398).

Introduction 17 11 Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 4. 12 David Gilmartin, ‘Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative’, Journal of Asian Studies [henceforth JAS], 57 (1998), 1068–1095 (p. 1072, fn. 3). 13 Sana Aiyar, ‘Fazlul Huq, Region and Religion in Bengal: The Forgotten Alternative of 1940–43’, MAS, 42 (2008), 1213–1249 (p. 1220). 14 Neilesh Bose, ‘Purba Pakistan Zindabad: Bengali Visions of Pakistan, 1940–1947’, MAS, 48 (2014), 1–36 (p. 8). Cf., Venkat Dhulipala, Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 15 Ian Copland, The Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire 1917–1947, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 229–260. 16 Jean-Baptiste Prashant More, Muslim Identity, Print Culture, and the Dravidian Factor in Tamil Nadu, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2004, pp. 160–162. 17 Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009, pp. 145, 159; Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013, pp. 184, 196–197. 18 Muhammad A. Jinnah, ‘Message to the Bombay Presidency Provincial Muslim League Conference Held at Hubli on the 26th and 27th May, 1940’, in Some Recent Speeches and Writings of Mr. Jinnah, ed. by Jamil-ud-Din Ahmad, Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1942, p. 163. 19 Cf., Bhimrao R. Ambedkar, Pakistan, or the Partition of India, Bombay: Thackers Publishers, 1946; Bhimrao R. Ambedkar, Thoughts on Linguistic States, New Delhi: Anand Sahitya Sadan, 1955. 20 David Washbrook, ‘Towards a History of the Present: Southern Perspectives on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition, ed. by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rochona Majumdar and Andrew Sartori, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 332–357. 21 Taylor Sherman’s chapter on linguistic reorganisation in Hyderabad is a notable exception. See Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India, Chapter 6. 22 Lisa Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009; Sumathi Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 23 Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, ‘Statement – 1: Population and Decadal Change by Residence: 2011 (PERSONS)’, Census of India, 2011: Primary Census Abstract (2011), www. censusindia.gov.in/2011census/PCA/A-2_Data_Tables/27%20A-2%20Maharastra.pdf (accessed 28 November 2017). 24 A. H. Dracup and Herbert T. Sorley, Census of India, 1931, Volume VIII: Bombay Presidency, Part II: Statistical Tables, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1933, pp. 359–369. 25 Marathas made up approximately 5.8 million inhabitants of Bombay Province, according to the 1931 Census. See Ibid., pp. 412–443. 26 Ibid., pp. 359–369, 412–443. 27 Ibid., pp. 412–443. 28 Joya Chatterji, ‘South Asian Histories of Citizenship, 1946–1970’, The Historical Journal, 55 (2012), 1049–1071 (p. 1049). 29 Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. 30 Niraja Gopal Jayal, Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013, p. 13. 31 Patrick Weil, How to be French: Nationality in the Making since 1789, trans. by Catherine Porter, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 32 Thomas H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class, London: Pluto Press, 1992 [1950].

18

Introduction

33 Valerian Rodrigues, ‘Citizenship and the Indian Constitution’, in Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution, ed. by Rajeev Bhargava, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 164–188 (p. 168). 34 James Holston, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008, p. 7. 35 Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 18. 36 Chatterji, ‘South Asian Histories of Citizenship’, p. 1056. 37 Rochana Bajpai, Debating Difference: Group Rights and Liberal Democracy in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011. 38 Shabnum Tejani, Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History, 1890–1950, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008, Chapter 6. 39 For the distinction between thin and thick citizenship, see Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman, ‘Return of the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory’, Ethics, 104.2 (1994), 352–381. 40 Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India, p. 8. 41 Ibid., p. 9. 42 Ibid., p. 11. 43 Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. 44 Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010; see also, Daniel Gorman, Imperial Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. 45 Saskia Sassen, ‘The Participation of States and Citizens in Global Governance’, Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 10 (2003), 5–28. 46 Louise Tillin, Remapping India: New States and Their Political Origins, London: Hurst and Company, 2013, pp. 21–22. 47 Véronique Bénéï, Schooling Passions: Nation, History, and Language in Contemporary Western India, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008, pp. 80, 136. 48 Benegal Shiva Rao, ed., The Framing of India’s Constitution, Select Documents, New Delhi: Indian Institute of Public Administration, 1967, Volume II, p. 61. Quoted in Tejani, Indian Secularism, p. 244. 49 For works on citizenship’s colonial-era antecedents in South Asia, see Sandip Hazareesingh, ‘The Quest for Urban Citizenship: Civic Rights, Public Opinion, and Colonial Resistance in Early Twentieth-Century Bombay’, MAS, 34 (2000), 797–829; Nikhil Rao, ‘Community, Urban Citizenship and Housing in Bombay, ca. 1919–1980’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 36.3 (2013), 415–433; Darren C. Zook, ‘Developing the Rural Citizen: Southern India, 1900–1947’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 23.1 (2000), 65–86; Eleanor Newbigin, ‘Personal Law and Citizenship in India’s Transition to Independence’, MAS, 45 (2011), 7–32. 50 Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India, p. 12. 51 Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, p. 47. 52 Cf., Bankey B. Misra, Government and Bureaucracy in India 1947–1976, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986; Zoya Hasan, Shyam N. Jha, and Rasheeduddin Khan, eds., The State, Political Processes and Identity: Reflections on Modern India, New Delhi: Sage, 1989; Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India’s Growing Crisis of Governability, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 53 Chris J. Fuller and John Harriss, ‘For an Anthropology of the Modern Indian State’, in The Everyday State and Society in Modern India, ed. by Chris J. Fuller and Véronique Bénéï, London: Hurst and Company, 2001, pp. 1–30 (p. 26). 54 Akhil Gupta, ‘Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State’, American Ethnologist, 22 (1995), 375–402 (p. 384); see also

Introduction 19

55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63

Akhil Gupta, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Craig Jeffrey and Jens Lerche, ‘Dimensions of Dominance: Class and State in Uttar Pradesh’, in The Everyday State and Society in Modern India, ed. by Chris J. Fuller and Véronique Bénéï, London: Hurst and Company, 2001, pp. 91–114. Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Tejani, Indian Secularism, Chapter 3. This is a trap fallen into by Sudipta Kaviraj and Satish Saberwal. See Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘On State, Society and Discourse in India’, in Rethinking Third World Politics, ed. by James Manor, London: Longman, 1991, pp. 72–99; Satish Saberwal, Roots of Crisis: Interpreting Contemporary Indian Society, New Delhi: Sage, 1996. William Gould, ‘“The Dual State: The Unruly Subordinate”, Caste, Community and Civil Service Recruitment in North India, 1930–1955’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 20 (2007), 13–43 (pp. 13–16). Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, ‘Customs of Governance: Colonialism and Democracy in Twentieth-Century India’, MAS, 41 (2007), 441–470 (pp. 447–448). Gupta, ‘Blurred Boundaries’, p. 384. Thomas Blom Hansen, ‘Governance and Myths of the State in Mumbai’, in The Everyday State and Society in Modern India, ed. by Chris J. Fuller and Véronique Bénéï, London: Hurst and Company, 2001, pp. 31–67. Gupta, ‘Blurred Boundaries’, p. 390.

2

Maharashtra between the wars Community, number and territory

The interwar years were a critical period for the British Raj, marked by a number of major shifts in colonial governmentality and the rise of popular anti-colonial nationalism. In the aftermath of the First World War, Indian subjects increasingly pressed for greater representation in the legislatures and bureaucracy as a reward for their participation in the war effort. Yet, these demands were frequently framed on the basis of community interests. In part, this owed something to longer colonial antecedents, which tended to privilege caste, linguistic or religious communities, rather than the individual, as the primary building blocks of Indian society. During the nineteenth century, European scholars and colonial administrators had imposed their own understandings of caste, language and religion onto a scattered and fragmentary body of indigenous ideas, customs and practices, which helped standardise, reify and essentialise these categories. At the same time, Indian elites were also at the forefront of authenticating and nationalising particular caste, linguistic or religious ‘traditions’, too, particularly as the colonial state relied heavily upon a small cadre of indigenous intermediaries in the lower echelons of the administration. What set the interwar years apart, however, was the manner in which such ideas about the centrality of community were politicised, in the novel context of an expanding franchise and the gradual democratisation of representative government, despite the fact that these reforms were ostensibly framed on the basis of individual rights.1 Equally critical to the functioning of this new kind of politics were older reflections on demographics and number, as enumerative technologies such as the census now came to be mapped onto measurements of electoral weight and adequate political representation. According to this logic, different communities, whether defined on the basis of caste, language or religion, were now categorised by the state on the basis of their ‘majority’ or ‘minority’ status, which was in turn connected to commonly held notions of the extent of their belonging to an imagined homeland. Whereas the ties connecting the majority population to a particular patch of territory were often considered indivisible and intrinsic, the supposedly ambivalent and extra-territorial loyalties of minorities caused both British administrators and Indian nationalists substantial anxiety and concern. Despite the enormous variety that was evident within such amorphous and haphazard categories, an image of Indian society as constituted by Hindu majority and Muslim minority, juxtaposed against and hostile towards one another, generally

Maharashtra between the wars

21

prevailed across India throughout this period. Equally, a particular vision of Indian history that perpetuated the tendency to see Muslims as intruders and invaders helped to simultaneously substantiate ‘the notion that Muslims had always been exterior to the nation’.2 These assumptions informed a range of policymaking decisions, including the award of separate electorates to Muslims in the political arena from 1909. However, this did not foreclose the possibility of other constructs of majority and minority that came to be ordered around alternative spaces within British India. This chapter suggests that the new impetus provided to provincial administrative arenas under the constitutional reforms of the interwar period meant that considerations of community and number were perhaps even more important at the provincial level. Whilst majority and minority were primarily defined on the basis of religious affiliation across the provinces of northern India, the relative paucity of the Muslim population in much of rural Madras and Bombay meant that the idea of majority and minority communities took on a rather different meaning. In Maharashtra, the emergence of a vocal non-Brahman movement since the nineteenth century had coalesced around the idea of the downtrodden bahujan samaj (‘people in the majority’), in contradistinction to both unrepresentative and alien Brahman and Gujarati elites. In their radical critiques of caste society, nonBrahman ideologues such as Jotirao Govindrao Phule (1827–1890) emphasised the commonalities between shudras and ati-shudras, as well as between the Marathas and all other non-Brahman castes. These ideas then came to be connected to questions about the nature and form of the franchise and representative government during the early interwar years. Representatives of both non-Brahmans and Dalits demanded the creation of either reserved seats or separate electorates for their communities on the basis of both their demographic preponderance and socio-economic backwardness. Meanwhile, a cogent (if somewhat elitist and conservative) Non-Brahman Party emerged to represent non-Brahman interests within the provincial assembly. However, Phule’s idea of the bahujan samaj, capable of incorporating both nonBrahmans and Dalits, underplayed existing tensions and fissures within and between these groups. The Non-Brahman Party primarily became a vehicle of urbanised professional and merchant Maratha interests, to the detriment of other erstwhile constituencies. Equally, Marathas (and non-Brahmans more generally) were amongst the most virulent opponents to Dalit activism in the late 1920s and early 1930s, objecting to campaigns supporting Dalit temple entry and their access to public spaces. Despite the efforts of the Dalit politician B. R. Ambedkar (1891– 1956) to promote a common front amongst these low status communities, Maharashtra’s non-Brahmans joined the provincial Congress Party in increased numbers during the 1930s, notwithstanding its past association with Brahman elites. This decoupling had enormous implications for constructions of majority and minority status in the region, especially as they came to be territorialised in the new context of both an impending independence and ongoing constitutional negotiations during and after the Second World War. Many non-Brahmans presumed democracy to be concomitant with a form of majoritarian rule. Favouring a federal formula for independent India, increasingly vociferous calls for the creation of Maharashtra

22

Maharashtra between the wars

were based upon the idea of privileging the position of a supposedly intrinsic Maratha, or Marathi-speaking, majority in certain districts of western India. By the end of the interwar period then, Maharashtra’s non-Brahman politicians had shifted from supporting separate electorates to demanding a separate province of their own to best protect their interests. Like Jinnah and the Muslim League, who were able to cite the existence of Muslim majorities in northeast and northwest India to demonstrate that they already existed as a politically distinct entity, the non-Brahman’s capacity to reject a common low-caste alliance with the Dalit community was predicated in part upon their potential to claim majority demographic status through linguistic reorganisation. Meanwhile, the new emphasis on linkages between territory, community and demography in prevailing understandings of democracy in South Asia meant that the Maharashtrian Dalits were left in an entirely unenviable position. As the smaller and less powerful constituency, they were rightfully concerned that the creation of Maharashtra would leave them at the mercy of the non-Brahman majority. Similar concerns pervaded the responses of Gujarati-speaking groups who resided in areas likely to be incorporated within a future Maharashtra. Yet, the territorially dispersed nature of the Dalit community across India meant that they were ultimately unable to transform minority into nationality in a similar way to some representatives of India’s Muslim population.3 By focusing on these linkages between community, number and territory, this chapter therefore provides a number of significant insights into why the advent of liberal democracy in India, framed around the individual rights-bearing citizen, failed to eradicate, and in many cases entrenched in new ways, the importance of community for citizens’ interactions with the state.

The interwar period and constitutional reform In the aftermath of the First World War, the nature of British rule in India changed significantly. Indian soldiers and labourers had contributed heavily to the British war effort, with more than a million troops enlisted for duty outside India, whilst the British and Indian governments had also relied heavily upon borrowings from the Indian market, leaving India with a debt of £370 million.4 Equally, Indian subjects had encountered their imperial rulers on the battlefields of the Western Front in ways rarely conceivable back home in the Indian subcontinent. Indian soldiers had been instructed to fight against other Europeans, shattering the myth of white superiority so carefully manufactured in colonial settings.5 India’s premier political organisation, the Indian National Congress, had supported the war effort in the hope of receiving greater political autonomy and representation as a reward for their loyalty, whilst the Government of India (GOI) had looked to assuage Western-educated public opinion and promote moderation by promising reform after the war. In 1917, Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, had indicated that India would be placed on the path towards self-government already established in the various ‘white dominions’ of the British Empire. Although an exact timetable for devolution was not laid out, this marked a fairly noticeable

Maharashtra between the wars

23

rhetorical shift. Montagu and the Viceroy of India, Lord Chelmsford, were now tasked with preparing the proposals for reform during 1917 and 1918. These recommendations were outlined in the Montagu-Chelmsford Report of 1918, and then embodied in the GOI Act of 1919. The 1919 Act has been described as a ‘watershed in the evolution of representative politics’ in India, bringing direct elections ‘to all levels of politics, from local boards to the provincial and national legislatures’.6 The Act stipulated that 70 per cent of the members of the provincial councils were to be elected and simultaneously extended the franchise amongst Indians. In the Bombay Legislative Council, although 28 members continued to be nominated by the colonial state (including 20 officials, and two representatives of the Depressed Classes), 86 were now to be directly (75) or indirectly (11) elected.7 When compared with the other provinces of British India, Bombay also witnessed the most liberal expansion of the franchise at this time, with approximately 500,000 of the 19 million civilians enfranchised on the basis of property ownership in 1920. This figure grew to around 4.1 per cent of the population in the 1929/30 provincial elections.8 The reforms also introduced a system known as dyarchy, or partial provincial self-government, in which the functions of government were effectively split in two. The central government in New Delhi remained entirely under the control of the British, whilst in the provincial legislatures some power was devolved to Indians. Although the most important provincial portfolios of police, justice and finance were ‘reserved’ in the hands of nominated British officials, for the first time elected Indian politicians were now able to take control of less sensitive subjects such as agriculture, health, education and public works at the provincial level. By introducing the reforms, the British hoped to divert attention towards opportunities for provincial power and prestige, rather than devolving power at the centre. Therefore, despite being couched in the rhetoric of gradual self-government, the 1919 Act was no announcement licencing independence, no intended relaxation of British control of the nature and pace of constitutional change. As Ranajit Guha has noted, enfranchisement was a ‘semantic sleight used to dignify measures for imperial control over the subcontinent by a spurious parallelism with the radical constitutional initiatives of nineteenth-century revolutions’.9 In fact, the 1919 Act had been preceded by the extension of the harsh wartime restrictions of the 1915 Defence of India Act. Under what became known as the Rowlatt Bills, the Indian population was to be subjected to legislation that permitted detention without warrant, charge or trial for relatively trivial offences such as the possession of seditious material. This aperture between the liberal principles of progress and improvement and illiberal government practices had a major impact on the nature of Indian politics during the early 1920s, radicalising disillusioned Westerneducated politicians and bringing M. K. Gandhi and his strategy of satyagraha (a form of passive resistance; literally ‘truth force’) to the forefront of the anticolonial nationalist movement. Despite the very gradual pace of democratisation in British India at this time, Anupama Rao has argued that ‘ideas of equality and individual rights introduced by British forms nevertheless became a recognisable political rhetoric and a

24

Maharashtra between the wars

formalised political ideology’.10 Drawing upon the work of C.L.R. James on Toussaint L’Ouverture and the Haitian Revolution, Rao has explored the development of a ‘distinctive colonial genealogy of rights’, in which rights claims amongst the colonised are situated ‘within particular socio-historical contexts of inequality and exploitation[,] . . . confront diverse forms of difference and are called upon to ameliorate contingent instantiations of inequality’.11 In late eighteenth-century Haiti, for example, ex-slave revolutionaries were able to redefine the Declaration of the Rights of Man as a founding document of racial equality. In India, meanwhile, the repertoire of rights claims was expanded and resituated in the context of a gradual process of democratisation during the interwar years, to encompass the specificities and inequalities of different communities now reimagined as constituencies. For leading Congress nationalists, the language of liberal democracy was employed vis-à-vis their British rulers, to demand parity in accessing the representative institutions and administrative structures of the Raj, and, increasingly, to express their right to self-determination. The 1919 GOI Act might be seen as an incomplete gesture towards some of these demands. In fact, the preamble to the Act proposed that 33 per cent of posts in the Indian Civil Service (ICS) should now be recruited for in India, with the percentage due to rise annually. Beyond the rarefied circles of leading Congress nationalists, however, spokesmen for other groupings and parties were wary that the Congress was itself primarily constituted by an elite indigenous group of high-caste Hindu men, a segment of society that also tended to dominate the limited bureaucratic and legislative opportunities provided for Indians by the state. As a consequence, new rights claims emerged that placed emphasis upon the distinctions that existed amongst Indians, in an effort to combat the underrepresentation of certain groups along the lines of caste, gender, region and religion. To some extent, demands for greater representation drew upon colonial precedents that defined India as organised on the basis of distinct communities, which the British now looked to harness to the imperatives of colonial rule. Various constitutional safeguards and qualifications introduced during the interwar period looked to guarantee the representation of particular interest groups and thereby undermine Congress support. Both the 1919 Act and its successor, the 1935 GOI Act, for example, continued the policy of separate electorates for India’s Muslims, which had only been inaugurated a decade earlier. According to this logic, separate electorates were framed as a form of commensuration, capable of ameliorating some of the problems that a Hindu majority potentially posed for adequate Muslim representation in government.

Non-Brahmans, Marathas and ‘Allied Castes’ Amongst those Indians who voiced concerns about their insufficient representation, the demands for political recognition were also shaped by longer histories of tension and exploitation between different communities. These conflicts were themselves often regionally situated in particular social contexts, and therefore varied across the subcontinent. In Maharashtra, perhaps as a consequence of the region’s relative paucity of linguistic and religious diversity, tensions and rivalries

Maharashtra between the wars

25

between social groups were primarily aligned on the basis of caste, and, in particular, in response to Brahman (i.e. ‘high-caste’, priestly) authority. We can trace critiques of caste hierarchy and Brahmanism as far back as the bhakti movements of medieval Maharashtra,12 but it was in response to the advent of British rule in western India that a more cogent and radical appraisal of Brahman influence first emerged. Although the Brahman Peshwa (hereditary ‘prime minister’ and de facto ruler of the Maratha polity), Bajirao II, was deposed in 1818, British rule actually reinforced Brahmanic authority. Despite the smokescreen of British liberalism, Brahmans already conversant in administrative skills and techniques under the Peshwa were best placed to populate the new political and bureaucratic institutions of the Raj. It was in recognition of the acute disadvantages encountered by nonBrahman castes, in the face of both the sacerdotal and secular authority of Brahmans in western India, that Jotirao Phule (from the Mali [gardener] caste) first articulated a radical anti-caste discourse in the mid-nineteenth century. Non-Brahmans as bahujan samaj Phule advocated ‘that a rejection of Brahman religious authority, and of the hierarchical values on which it was based, formed the precondition for any real change in [the non-Brahman] condition’.13 In a number of books, such as Ballad of Raja Chhatrapati Shivaji Bhosale (1869) and Slavery (1873), Phule constructed a historical narrative that provided an explanation for the contemporary suppression and inequality of non-Brahman castes. In doing so he borrowed from and inverted the idea of an ancient Aryan invasion of the subcontinent, which had first been ‘discovered’ by European Orientalists such as William Jones and Henry Colebrooke in the late eighteenth century. Jones, for example, was to extrapolate from his readings of the Vedas (ancient Hindu religious scriptures) a synergy between this ancient Aryan invasion and a history of the penetration of Brahmanism into India.14 High-caste Hindu revivalists were later to take up this Aryan invasion myth as marking the beginnings of a golden age in South Asian history, in which an Aryan identity was capable of encompassing all Hindus as a marker of Indian nationhood.15 Phule, however, re-envisaged such civilisational efflorescence as occurring in an idyllic pre-Aryan period, under the rule of the mythical King Bali. The invasion of the Aryan Brahmans shattered this utopian society and marked the beginning of their historic battle with the first peoples, the Dravidian Kshatriyas (non-Brahmans). According to this narrative, it was only after the Dravidian Kshatriyas’ defeat that the Brahmans were able to invent a number of supposedly sacred texts that justified the subjugation of the rest of Indian society. Phule ‘supported this interpretation by deriving the term Kshatriya from the Marathi word kshetra, a field or place’, in which Kshatriya ‘denoted all those living peaceably together on the land before the arrival of the Brahman invaders’.16 As we shall see momentarily, such a depiction was significant for delinking ‘Kshatriya-ness’ from its religious connotations, in which Brahman scholars were necessary for the bestowing of such status. This vision of Indian history also emphasised the exoticism of Brahmans (and Brahmanic Hinduism) and the

26

Maharashtra between the wars

indigeneity of non-Brahmans. In a similar way to which Hindu nationalists considered Muslims as extraneous to the Indian nation, Phule was able to place additional emphasis on the non-Brahman as ‘the common man, the soldier and the tiller of the soil’, who had the greater claim to belonging in the region as ‘the original master of the land’.17 Phule’s references to the collective and cooperative nature of his pre-Aryan idyll were meant to stress the distinction between Brahman interests and those of the bahujan samaj (‘people in the majority’). Meanwhile, this emphasis on majority status highlighted ‘the overrepresentation of the Brahmin minority in educational and bureaucratic contexts’.18 But the idea of the bahujan samaj also signified a potentiality, an opportunity for a radical and egalitarian alliance of different non-Brahman castes in Maharashtra, capable of collectively rejecting the graded distinctions and inequities that existed between them as emblematic of the impact of an alien Brahmanism, and uniting in a shared sense of their Kshatriya past. It was this potentiality that informed the establishment of the Satyashodhak Samaj (Truth Seekers’ Society) in 1873, the premier non-Brahman socio-religious reform organisation in western India before the First World War. The Samaj spread Phule’s message through popular expressive forms like pavadas (ballads) and abhangs (hymns), continuing to foreground his ‘assertion of mass equality and brotherhood of indigenous non-Aryan peoples’.19 The multiple meanings of Maratha As we have already seen, one of the central components of a collective non-Brahman identity was their shared history as Dravidian Kshatriyas. Equally relevant were mutual ties to the history of the Maratha polity and an incorporative Maratha identity. However, in its broadest sense, the term ‘Maratha’ was often applied to all Marathi speakers, whether Brahman, non-Brahman or Dalit. This was certainly how early British commentators understood the term when they encountered the Maratha polity during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.20 It could also be understood in two more circumscribed ways. It was frequently applied as an elite designation, to connote those Maratha Kshatriya families with ‘princely blood’, who were capable of tracing their lineage to royal Rajput forebears. This understanding of the term, however, was habitually undercut by its use to describe an amorphous agricultural caste cluster, a more restricted notion of Maratha status than the habit of applying it to all Marathi speakers, but not as limited an application as that pertaining to a small princely elite. These different designations were themselves products of the complicated processes through which the term Maratha had first developed. A distinct Maratha identity had first emerged in the fourteenth century, when local military servicemen were frequently drawn into the armies of the Muslim dynasties in the Deccan. With only a small population of Muslims in the region, the Sultanates drew upon other communities to mobilise new military units, which were kept separate from ‘Dakhani’ (Muslims born in India) and ‘Afagi’ (Muslim immigrants from Central Asia or Arabia) groups. The term ‘Maratha’ probably became the name of designation for these military servicemen gradually over time,

Maharashtra between the wars

27

and represented an amalgam of families from several artisanal and agricultural backgrounds, many of which were considered socially low in status and esteem.21 By the seventeenth century, the term ‘Maratha’ had come to signify the loose classbased distinction of a military elite standing apart from those ordinary peasants from whence they had come, evident in the granting to military servicemen of shares in the revenue of the land. However, ongoing conflicts and intrigues between different states and their local revenue-extracting intermediaries always provided opportunities for new grant-holders to emerge throughout this period. This continued to confuse any strictly delineated distinction between rights-holding Marathas, cultivating Kunbis and other agricultural and artisanal groups. As the colonial ethnographer R. E. Enthoven was to note even at the beginning of the twentieth century, The differentiation between Marathas and Maratha Kunbis appears never to have become so complete as to result in two distinct castes. At present the terms Maratha and Kunbi, in many cases, are used synonymously. . . . Instances are not wanting, in which Kunbi families, owing to a fortunate turn in their circumstances, have formed connections with poor Maratha families and ultimately become absorbed into the general Maratha community.22 It was from these amorphous ranks of military and landholding servicemen that Shivaji Bhosale (1630–1680), who had inherited his father’s lands at the behest of the Bijapur Sultanate in 1640, first emerged. Over the next 30 years, Shivaji consolidated his own authority beyond his hereditary household lands, so that he was able to pronounce himself an independent ruler over an extensive Maratha polity. In 1674 Shivaji was crowned Chhatrapati (literally ‘paramount sovereign’), as part of his efforts to portray himself as a rightful ruler and forge his legitimacy in the eyes of other large landowning families. As part of this ceremony, Shivaji claimed the status of a Kshatriya, not in the sense that Phule later reinterpreted the term, but as a marker of ‘traditional’ kingly status. In Maharashtra, local Brahmanic folklore held Kshatriya lineages had been destroyed by Parashurama, a warrior Brahman avatar of Vishnu, who had sought to avenge the death of his father at the hands of a Kshatriya king. This ‘tradition’ was accorded contemporary reality by Maharashtrian Brahmans, who saw in the Muslim rule over the Deccan from the fourteenth century evidence that Hindu kingly lineages had died out and lapsed, as Kshatriyas had either been killed in battle or emigrated further south.23 In this context, Shivaji’s claims to Kshatriya status came under intense scrutiny. He was perceived to be merely a Shudra (i.e. the lowest caste order within the varna system), meaning there could be no grounds for investing him with the sacred thread and ritual devices of a Kshatriya. Instead, Shivaji had to rely upon pandit (Brahman scholar) networks from further afield, employing a Maharashtrian Brahman residing in Banaras, known as Gaga Bhatta, whose family had a long history of emphasising the social worth of the upwardly mobile and successful. Gaga was able to ‘locate’ Shivaji’s ancient Rajput lineage, which ensured he was able to claim Kshatriya status.24

28

Maharashtra between the wars

Shivaji’s struggles were replicated over 200 years later, when Shahu II (r. 1894– 1922), the Maharaja of Kolhapur and a direct descendant of Shivaji, successfully sought to reassert the purity of his lineage and his entitlement to Vedic rites as a Kshatriya king in religious ceremonies. The controversy over Shahu’s status in 1900 encouraged other princely and aristocratic families amongst the Marathas to stress their Kshatriya heritage and demand access to certain rituals based on sacred texts drawn from the Puranas.25 A number of books were published that delineated the particular genealogical histories of the famous 96 ‘pure’ Maratha families, who were capable of tracing their lineage back to their Rajput and Aryan forebears.26 In an effort to assert their distinctive identity as Kshatriyas, the families of supposedly ‘genuine’ Marathas also turned towards the practice of marathmola, which, despite being defined as a ‘true old Maratha custom’, may well have been a nineteenth-century invention. Marathmola mainly revolved around the seclusion of women (purdah), the wearing of the veil (burqa) amongst womenfolk and the prohibition of widow remarriage. The practice of marathmola supposedly distinguished the ‘true’ Maratha from the ‘ordinary’ Kunbi agriculturalist, ‘whose women helped their husbands in the fields and could remarry after the death of their spouse’.27 As well as drawing upon elements of Islamic- and Victorian-gendered ideals, these forms of regulation mirrored aspects of Brahmanic religious culture, including beliefs about female chastity and ‘the wife’s obedience to the husband during his life and continued faithfulness to him beyond his death’.28 In circumscribing who could be classed as a Maratha by establishing the purity of their womenfolk, these ‘genuine’ Marathas thereby reinforced notions of caste hierarchy and social superiority. However, well-to-do and aspiring Kunbi families were also not averse to adopting aspects of these practices themselves, in an effort to enhance their social mobility and equally claim Maratha Kshatriya status. In doing so, they not only distinguished themselves from other non-Brahmans who had claimed Maratha status in the past, but also helped undermine the radicalism evident within Phule’s critical approach to the caste system and the cultural hegemony of Brahmanism. The avowal of both Maratha and Kshatriya status in this frame had a number of important implications for any consideration of the nature of the fledgling nonBrahman movement. It highlights the shift away from Phule’s egalitarianism, as well as his radical rejection of the caste system, Aryan identity and Brahmanic authority, and instead demonstrates a greater degree of conformity with the ideas of ritual status and caste hierarchy within Hindu history. In fact, Phule had always intentionally underplayed the significance of Maratha identity to non-Brahman politics, concerned about the potential divisiveness of the term for relations between Maratha-Kunbis and other lower castes. When he did use the term, it was applied in a much broader sense to embrace all non-Brahman and Dalit castes, rather than either an elite Maratha or Maratha-Kunbi caste grouping.29 The change in leadership of the non-Brahman movement after Phule’s death also embodied the move away from a radical anti-caste and anti-Brahman politics towards political non-Brahmanism instead. Political non-Brahmanism was more concerned with challenging the position of Brahmans as the dominant caste within legislative and

Maharashtra between the wars

29

administrative arenas, rather than undermining the caste system as a whole. This latter position was personified in the politics of Shahu II, who promoted nonBrahman educational and administrative advancement within his own government through reservations. On the one hand, Shahu ostensibly voiced his commitment to a radical critique of caste hierarchy, particularly under the influence of the Satyashodhak Samaj. But, as the controversy over his ritual recognition suggests, he was otherwise more frequently sucked into contesting questions about his own personal prestige, as well as the ritual and socio-political status of both Marathas and non-Brahmans, within the terms set by Brahmanism. The Marathas and ‘Allied Castes’ in interwar Bombay Despite the best efforts of ‘genuine’ Marathas, an understanding of the term ‘Maratha’ as being linked to a very broad Maratha-Kunbi caste cluster claiming Kshatriya status became increasingly prevalent during the interwar period. In the census returns, for example, there was a notable demographic upsurge in the number of Kunbis who now stated their caste as Maratha. According to the census of 1901, 2.3 million persons residing in the Marathi-speaking districts of Bombay Province (excluding Bombay City) returned themselves as Marathas, whilst 987,722 returned themselves as Kunbis.30 However, by the 1931 census, of the 5.8 million ‘Mahrattas and Kunbis’ residing in the entire Bombay Presidency, 4.2 million returned themselves as Marathas, whilst 833,542 declared themselves to be Kunbis. By this point, between 40 and 50 per cent of the entire population in western Maharashtra area had come to use the term ‘Maratha’ to connote their caste status.31 This marked a shift away from its elite connotations, as only capable of referring to the 96 ‘genuine’ Maratha families. But it also pointed to how the term Maratha was no longer applicable to either all Marathi speakers (whether Brahman, non-Brahman, or Dalit) or all non-Brahman castes. This shift had a number of significant implications on the politics of the interwar period. During the First World War, a number of non-Brahman organisations had emerged, demanding some form of political acknowledgement as recompense for their military service. Prominent non-Brahman representatives suggested that their recognition as a separate political entity would help them to challenge Brahman power in both local and provincial legislative and administrative spheres. The difficulty, however, was in defining the exact constituency through which to make such demands for commensuration upon the state. The Deccan Ryots (i.e. ‘peasants’) Association, formed in September 1917, submitted proposals to Montagu and Chelmsford that suggested the reforms would be potentially harmful to nonBrahman peasants, due to ‘the mental weakness of the masses of India’, driving them ‘to the wall in the free fight of general competition between the strong and the weak’.32 It is clear from this statement that the Association worried about the impact that this particular form of colonial democracy would have upon the region, with the franchise based around property qualifications and no special compensation earmarked for underprivileged Hindu groups. Yet, this was no call for a universal franchise. Rather, the Association revealed their elite composition by

30

Maharashtra between the wars

advocating for the special representation of all peasant (i.e. non-Brahman) interests by ‘experienced and influential landlords, merchants, coming not only from Bombay but from the mofussil [i.e. the rural hinterland] also, men who may not be very skilful orators but who can bring with them common sense, experience and interest in the welfare of their constituencies’.33 Despite the planned extension of the franchise under the 1919 Act, the general consensus amongst most colonial administrators, Congressmen and community-based organisations was that elite representatives would be best placed to mediate democracy in India. Rather than asking for separate electorates for ‘educationally backward classes’ in their entirety, as the Deccan Ryots Association had done, the Maratha League (established in Nasik in December 1918) instead asked for a number of allotted seats on the basis of distinctive castes. They suggested that a separate non-Brahman and Dalit electorate should comprise of a range of reserved seats within it: ten seats for Marathas; four for Lingayats; one for Jains; four for ‘untouchables’; and ten for other ‘backward non-Brahman Hindoo communities’.34 This demand, coming as it did from an association organised to represent only elite Marathas, demonstrated the aforementioned propensity amongst certain members of that community to distinguish themselves from other non-Brahmans as Kshatriyas, rather than Shudras. The Montagu-Chelmsford Report rejected the demands for separate electorates for non-Brahmans in Bombay, but accepted the necessity of allotting to a novel grouping of ‘Marathas and Allied Castes’ seven reserved seats within the ‘General’ (i.e. non-Muslim) constituency for the Bombay provincial legislature. This definition did not include all non-Brahman castes, but was a wider designation than one based around reserved seats for Marathas alone. As the Bombay Reforms Commissioner, C. N. Seddon, suggested, ‘[W]e do not intend to employ the term Maratha in a narrow sense, but mean to include certain other allied castes’.35 Leading representatives of both the Marathas and non-Marathas objected to this terminology, which they argued was unrepresentative of the social reality. A. B. Latthe, a Jain, ally of the Maharaja of Kolhapur, and founding member of the Deccan Ryots Association, wrote, ‘What is this novel group? We know of none. The Marathas as such have indeed claimed special representation. But they have never spoken of themselves as a group of “Marathas and Allied Communities”’.36 Despite these objections, this designation ultimately formed the basis for the reservations. The term ‘Maratha’ came to be used as shorthand for electoral purposes, to incorporate any person belonging to a number of supposedly allied castes, including Kunbis, Malis, Kolis, Shimpis and Dhangars. The absorption of a number of discrete non-Brahman castes into a broad ‘Maratha and Allied Caste’ category had a number of important consequences for non-Brahman politics during the 1920s. First, it ensured the numerical preponderance of this grouping within the Maharashtrian districts of Bombay. In this sense, it replicated Phule’s notion of the bahujan samaj, albeit now reoriented in the interests of political power. However, the ‘Maratha and Allied Caste’ designation also caused resentment amongst ‘genuine’ Marathas who were unhappy that nonMarathas could now claim similar status. At the same time, ‘Allied Castes’ were

Maharashtra between the wars

31

conscious that the reserved seats might be monopolised by the Marathas within this category, who tended to be both better educated and constituted the largest community. Finally, it also excluded a number of non-Brahman castes from accessing these reserved seats. So, despite replicating the idea of the bahujan samaj in terms of demographics, the ‘Maratha and Allied Caste’ category actually pointed towards the tensions and hierarchies that were replete within the movement, rather than the radical and egalitarian alliance that Phule and the Satyashodhak Samaj originally had in mind. The award of seven reserved seats to the Marathas and Allied Castes was justified by the British on the basis of their ‘ignorance . . . their want of power of cooperation and their susceptibility to outside influence’.37 Accordingly, the Marathas and ‘Allied Castes’ were considered ‘backward’ enough to warrant reservations as one form of protection from the supposed depredations of Brahman officials and priests. Yet, in a gradually expanding democracy, the demographic weight of this new constituency meant the Marathas and Allied Castes also now formed the majority of the electorate in certain seats. During their evidence to the Southborough Committee, the Government of Bombay (GOB) also argued that the Marathas’ ‘numbers and importance make it desirable that they should be represented’.38 The award, as the Dalit politician B. R. Ambedkar observed, therefore gave the Marathas a double advantage: They will thus have an assured chance in these areas (where they have seats reserved) and an equally certain prospect of returning their representatives in other areas where seats are not proposed to be reserved for them but where, owing to their numerical strength they will be in a position to win.39 As a consequence, Marathas during the 1920s engaged with nascent conceptions of democracy not only as a form of commensuration, based around compensating the community for its apparent ‘backwardness’, but were also capable of imagining democracy as an exercise in forms of local majoritarianism. This has important implications when thinking about the emergence of demands for Samyukta Maharashtra. Although incapable of forming a majority in Bombay Province as a whole on account of its Gujarati- and Kannada-speaking districts, as well as the Muslim ‘majority’ in Sind, the Marathas and Allied Castes were now capable of countering Brahman dominance at the district, taluka (sub-district) and municipal level on the basis of their local majority status. Consequently, the significance of community and number came to be linked to control over administrative territory. Government records drawn from this time are replete with accounts of tensions between Brahmans and non-Brahmans, and successful struggles for control over local boards. The Collector of Satara, for example, described elections to the local board in Khanapur taluka in February 1925, as resulting ‘in a complete victory for the nonBrahmins who secured all the seats. Elated by their success they were carried beyond the bounds of discretion and commenced a campaign of abuse against the Brahmins, especially against the local officials’.40 When some of these Brahman officials responded to the abuse, the Collector felt obliged to transfer the errant

32

Maharashtra between the wars

officers. Such developments were by no means an isolated example. In Nasik District, non-Brahmans had ‘got most of the power in local bodies into their hands’ by December 1927, ‘and on the District Local Board they use this power in making appointments. Brahmin teachers complain bitterly of their treatment in the matter of transfers’.41 By the end of the decade, non-Brahmans had gained control of most of the local boards in the Deccan. At the provincial level, a unified Non-Brahman Party was established after a meeting of prominent non-Brahman leaders on 12 December 1920. It was generally composed of elite members of non-Brahman castes, with backgrounds as lawyers, urban merchants and rural landlords. In this sense, it represented its constituents – the limited reforms of 1919 had enfranchised landlords and rich peasants in the countryside, but no more. The Non-Brahman Party was to contest a number of seats in the three provincial elections held under dyarchy during the 1920s, and experienced some notable success in the 19 directly elected nonMuslim constituencies in Marathi-speaking districts (including Bombay City). In 1920, they won ten seats without any need for reservation (i.e. they would have won in any case), although they were aided by the Congress decision to boycott the elections during Gandhi’s Non-Cooperation Movement. In 1923 they won four seats by clear margins in Poona, Satara, East Khandesh and Sholapur City, but relied upon the reserved seats to claim four others. And in 1926 the party won in nine constituencies, with only two of their candidates requiring the reservation to cross the line.42 They therefore consistently gained around half of the seats in the region. Despite these ostensible achievements, many of the so-called ‘Allied Castes’ quickly came to recognise that they were unable to benefit from the reforms because of Maratha dominance within this category. In the aforementioned elections to the provincial legislature during the 1920s, Marathas won 18 of the 21 reserved seats, whilst the Allied Castes acquired only two.43 It was against this background of Maratha dominance of the reservations that an Allied Castes Conference held in Poona in November 1932, ahead of the next round of constitutional reforms, petitioned the state for a further seven separate seats to be reserved for the Allied Castes alone.44 This demand was based on the exceptional status of the Allied Castes, as constituted separately from the Marathas, and played upon the difficulties these different communities experienced in gaining representation both in the general electorate and in the reserved seats. The significance of number was again central to these petitions. For A. N. Surve, who chaired the Allied Castes Conference, the demographic preponderance of the Marathas in Maharashtra was nothing but a ‘false picture presented by combining together the total population of the Kunbi caste (which is one of the Allied Castes) and the Maratha caste’. If, as he suggested, the figures of the Kunbis were deducted from those of the Maratha Caste Proper and added to the Allied Castes, it will produce a totally different picture, from which it will appear that the Allied Castes are overwhelming in numbers.45

Maharashtra between the wars

33

Again, this was an attempt to build a broad-based coalition of Shudra castes, which also envisaged democracy as an exercise in majoritarianism, but one that now excluded Marathas (but not Kunbis) from this designation, as they increasingly claimed Kshatriya status. The GOI, however, ultimately rejected the demand for further reservations for Allied Castes in the constitutional reforms of the 1930s.

Marathas, Marathi and Maharashtra Whilst representatives of the Allied Castes desired further reservations in the legislature ahead of the next round of constitutional reform, leading Maratha politicians were more ambivalent towards the continuation of reserved seats. In fact, at the Bombay Provincial Non-Brahman Conference in May 1931, representatives of the Marathas in attendance were prepared to endorse a resolution that read, ‘The Marathas have sufficiently organised themselves and being larger in number as a group than any individual caste of the Allied Castes group, do not require any more this protection, nor do they ask for it for the future’.46 The relative quiescence that accompanied the end of reserved seats amongst the Marathas by 1935 owed much to an increased sense amongst them of the significance of democratic governance, not in terms of commensuration, but understood instead as a form of local majoritarianism. Maratha representatives now looked to rely upon the community’s demographic preponderance to capture political power in the general constituencies within Marathi-speaking districts; reserved seats were no longer necessary. This strength in number also paved the way for the Marathas to capture political power within the provincial Congress Party by the end of the interwar years. There were a number of reasons why non-Brahmans were increasingly drawn towards the Indian National Congress during the interwar years. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most non-Brahmans justifiably presented the early Congress as exclusively articulating the elitist concerns of Western-educated, urban Maharashtrian Brahmans.47 However, non-Brahman perceptions shifted from a position that equated the Congress with Brahman hegemony at the start of the 1920s, to one that looked to the Congress as a site of socially ameliorative rhetoric and political opportunity by the late 1930s. Chapter 4 considers this shift in greater detail, but, for now, it is worth pointing out how changing non-Brahman perceptions of the Congress owed something to the party’s attempts to reposition itself as a more representative and accountable organisation in response to the extension of the franchise. Under Gandhi’s leadership, the Congress inaugurated a new constitution at its December 1920 session in Nagpur, with the aim of recruiting new members from a wider social background.48 In this regard, the Congress was restructured at the provincial level. In Bombay Province and Sind, the Congress was reorganised into five distinct Provincial Congress Committees (PCCs): Gujarat PCC for Gujarati speakers; Karnataka PCC for Kannada speakers; Maharashtra PCC for Marathi speakers; Sind PCC for Sindhi speakers; and a separate Bombay City PCC to take account of the city’s cosmopolitan, multilingual makeup. Gandhi and his supporters framed this decision as one aspect of the effective realisation of democratic governance, capable of enhancing ‘the political and social

34

Maharashtra between the wars

progress of the respective communities speaking a common vernacular and therefore the growth of India as a whole’.49 But it also points towards the Congress’s recognition of the strength of linguistic sentiment, as a key marker of identity and belonging amongst the wider Indian population. In fact, the party also theoretically committed to the idea of provincial reorganisation on linguistic lines at this time, a pledge it promised to achieve once independence was realised. Marathi and Maratha history The Congress’s desire to incorporate manifestations of regional and linguistic sentiment within the nationalist movement demonstrates the way in which languages had come to be viewed as key markers of identity and belonging in South Asian society by the early twentieth century. These were built around shared assumptions that ‘languages . . . each possess their own individual histories, narratives, literatures, and peoples’, in which specific languages were ‘experienced as inalienable attributes’.50 By contrast, Lisa Mitchell has pointed to the ‘complex multilingualism’ encountered by the first European colonisers, in which it was commonplace for individual languages in pre-colonial South Asia to be primarily perceived ‘as tools to accomplish particular tasks’.51 The emergence of distinct linguistic identities, personified through the idea of the ‘mother tongue’, was in part the consequence of certain colonial administrative practices, including the census, the creation of administrative districts on linguistic lines for revenue collection purposes, colonial educational policies and colonial language learning aids like grammars and lexicons.52 Amongst others, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Telugu and Tamil public spheres, under the tutelage of leading indigenous intellectuals, started to emerge across the subcontinent by the mid-nineteenth century, through which complex linguistic practices were homogenised, important literary and scientific texts in the English were translated, and those deemed the most significant vernacular literary and historical texts were venerated.53 In western India, a standardised grammar, syntax and style for Marathi was developed through the patronage of institutions such as the Bombay Native Education Society, and embedded within a bilingual educational policy. A distinctive Marathi public sphere emerged, in which vernacular intellectuals, such as Krishnashastri Chiplunkar (1824–1876) and Balshastri Jambhekar (1812–1846) ‘were engaged in rendering important texts and ideas of political economy into Marathi’.54 Initial access to these ‘modern’ ideas and discourses was dependent upon an individual’s proficiency in English, and hence it was educated Brahmans who controlled and directed the attendant growth in Marathi prose and cultural productions. By the 1870s, the Brahman intelligentsia was ‘articulating a collective self-identity of the Marathi people’, in which only they would have the right to ‘speak on behalf’ of the entire Marathi-speaking community.55 The monthly Nibandhmala (‘A Garland of Essays’), for example, edited by Krishnashastri’s son, Vishnushashtri Chiplunkar (1850–1882), asserted an exclusive upper-caste claim to define the boundaries of vernacular textuality.56 Despite these claims, the Satyashodhak Samaj was also able to present lower-caste voices as an alternative Marathi-speaking

Maharashtra between the wars

35

public, capable of contesting upper-caste dominance over new modes of publicity through popular expressive forms such as oral performance and non-Brahman melas (gatherings; fairs). In their performative ballads and hymns, Phule and others intentionally employed a more plebeian, rustic and accessible form of Marathi than the high literary prose of upper-caste vernacular intellectuals.57 These attempts to democratise Marathi were part of the wider democratic impulse evident within Phule’s conception of the bahujan samaj. Linguistic sentiment amongst Marathi speakers formed one element of a broader emotional attachment to the region, in which the celebration of the Maratha past also played a highly significant and emotive part. Ownership of this period of history, which stretched from the reign of Shivaji in the seventeenth century through to the final defeat of the Peshwa by the East India Company in 1818, became a site of contestation between a range of different groups, who ‘sought to bolster their claims to speak for Maharashtra’s future as its rightful leaders in all walks of life’.58 The Brahman jurist M. G. Ranade (1842–1901), a founding member of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha (People’s Service Society) and advocate of Hindu social reform, foregrounded a united Maharashtrian past, as a compelling example to be taken up by contemporary Indian nationalists. His Rise of the Maratha Power focused on the cohesive and harmonious nationhood achieved by the Maratha ‘race’, which, he claimed, was a result of an alliance between Brahmans, Marathas and other regional jatis throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: The foundation was laid broad and deep in the hearts of the whole people. Unlike the Subhedarships of Bengal, Karnatak, Oudh, and Hyderabad, the rise of the Maratha Power was due to the first beginnings of what one may call the process of nation-making. . . . It was the upheaval of the whole population, strongly bound together by the common affinities of language, race, religion and literature, and seeking further solidarity by a common independent political existence. . . . It was a national movement, or upheaval in which all classes co-operated.59 In Ranade’s interpretation, then, the history of the Marathas provided succour to both a Maharashtrian regional consciousness and a larger Indian nationalism. Central to this vision of Maratha history was the idea of ‘Maharashtra dharma’, and, specifically, the way in which the seventeenth-century Brahman poet Ramdas employed the concept in the following phrase: ‘Bring all the Marathas together and spread the Maharashtra dharma’.60 For the reformist Ranade, this reference to Maharashtra dharma by Ramdas, in the same sentence as an appeal to unity, provided evidence of the distinctive religious values and practices of the Marathas. Founded on the social inclusiveness and egalitarianism associated with bhakti, Marathas from different caste groups (including Brahmans such as Ramdas) were keen to emphasise the superior worth of individual devotional spirituality above the priestly rituals and traditions associated with Brahmanism. Ramdas was also central to other interpretations of Maratha history, albeit in an entirely different manner. The works of V. K. Rajwade (1863–1926) and the

36

Maharashtra between the wars

‘Poona School’ of Maratha political history, for example, offered a more ‘orthodox’ interpretation of Maratha history to that proffered by reformists such as Ranade. In this telling, Shivaji was primarily presented as the ‘defender of Hindustan’ against ‘foreign’ Muslim invasion, and as ruling under the definitive influence and guidance of his spiritual adviser, Ramdas. In fact, Rajwade created the following formula to explain his own understanding of Ramdas’s philosophy of ‘Maharashtra dharma’, which placed a much greater emphasis on the centrality of Hinduism to the Maratha polity: ‘Maharashtra dharma (Hinduism in Maharashtra) = Hinduism in other parts of India + establishment of righteous rule + protection of cows and Brahmans + freedom + unity + leadership’.61 The Poona School therefore tended to depict the Maratha polity as engaging in an active, anti-Muslim and orthodox Hinduism based around Brahman precepts and concerns. This also informed the approach to Maratha history of the nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920), who was inspired by Vishnushastri Chiplunkar’s call for a revival in national pride over the Maratha past. By 1895 Tilak had displaced the social reformers in the Sarvajanik Sabha, which by now was operating as a provincial wing of the Congress, after consolidating ‘anti-reform’ Brahman opinion in Maharashtra around the Age of Consent controversy. Tilak combined elements of Brahmanic social conservatism, radical anti-colonial nationalism and popular appeals to Maharashtrian patriotism in his Kesari (Marathi) and Mahratta (English) newspapers. Generally recognised in nationalist historiography as India’s first ‘popular’ national leader, Tilak recognised ‘the decisive importance of the symbolic manipulation of the avenues for publicity within modern politics’.62 Besides newspapers, Tilak inaugurated the Ganapati utsava (a festival in honour of the Hindu deity Ganesh celebrated with particular vigour in Maharashtra) and Shivaji jayanti (birth anniversary celebrations of Shivaji) during the 1890s, which drew upon historic symbols of regional unity and belonging in an effort to stimulate wider anti-colonial national consciousness.63 The performative spectacles that encompassed these festivities encouraged Maharashtrians beyond the middleclass dominated literary spheres and debating chambers of the Congress to take part in celebrations of their heritage, as well as display an active interest in contemporary political themes and nationalist rhetoric. However, many nonBrahmans did not easily identify with the narrow social agenda articulated within this version of Maratha history. Many sought to reclaim Shivaji from the Brahmans, taking issue with their argument about Ramdas’s decisive impact on Shivaji, and instead suggesting that the two did not meet until towards the end of Shivaji’s life. This was part of a broader effort on the part of non-Brahmans to downplay apparent examples of Brahman influence over the polity, which they maintained had resulted in a misrepresentation of Maratha history. Erasing Brahman contributions to Maratha history also made it easier for non-Brahmans to claim the category of ‘Maratha’ for themselves alone. During the 1920s, non-Brahman activists made a concerted effort to wrest neighbourhood Shivaji festivals from Brahman control. To celebrate Shivaji’s birthday in Khanapur Taluka (Satara District) in 1925, for example, a Satya Samaj

Maharashtra between the wars

37

tamasha (performance) was held by non-Brahmans, ‘at which the Brahman community was thoroughly abused’.64 By using a variety of forms of public expression, such as songs, pamphlets, plays and pictures, non-Brahmans put forward their own view of Maratha history, which venerated Shivaji’s kingship and poured scorn upon the supposedly decadent and debauched period of Peshwa rule. In the controversial Deshache Dushman (Enemies of the Country), published in 1925, the non-Brahman authors made reference to various examples from Maratha history to illustrate Brahman bastardy, treachery and effeminacy.65 These comments were particularly significant in a contemporary context that emphasised physical strength as a harbinger of national regeneration. In fact, Tilak had endorsed efforts to make the Shivaji festival ‘an arena for physical activity’ by drawing upon ‘the potential of Shivaji’s military legacy for a masculine regeneration of society’.66 Since the late nineteenth century, concerns about anti-colonial protest had also led the British to exclude Brahmans from military recruitment, with Marathas taking their place as the region’s foremost ‘martial race’. By omitting Brahmans from the military glory that characterised the Maratha past, the authors of Deshache Dushman played upon these contemporary issues and stereotypes, whilst also emphasising the illegitimacy of Brahman claims to have contributed to Maratha history. Despite these continuing contestations, a degree of consensus between Brahmans and Marathas over their shared regional identity began to emerge during the 1930s. In part, this owed much to the aforementioned desire of many Maratha and Kunbi families to claim elite social status as upper-caste Kshatriyas, which ultimately undermined the radical critiques of Hinduism, Brahmanism and the caste system. Claims to Kshatriya status amongst Marathas were premised upon ‘superior’ religious practices and ‘legitimate’ genealogical histories, which differentiated them from other non-Brahmans and Dalits. In this sense, they reflected similar strategies employed by Brahmans to emphasise their upper-caste status. Tensions between Brahmans and Marathas were also softened, or at least internalised within the party’s provincial structure, by the decision of many Marathas to join the Congress during the 1930s. As a consequence, Maratha history also came to function as a site of shared affinities between Brahmans and non-Brahmans, particularly when the special role of the Marathas as protectors and prototypes for the wider Indian nation was emphasised.67 A common regional identity was to develop around the idea of the ‘Marathi manus’ (Marathi man), as ‘the modern incarnation of the historical Maratha’.68 Whilst the latter designation had gradually come to connote specifically non-Brahman groups, the former was now capable of representing a Marathi-speaking elite that incorporated both (Kshatriya) Marathas and Brahmans. The emerging consensus on linguistic/regional identity also provided the foundation for increasingly coherent demands for the creation of a Marathispeaking province during the 1940s. But these demands were also shaped by an interwar context that privileged an understanding of language as an inalienable attribute, introduced provincial devolution and implemented other, contemporaneous demands for provincial reorganisation.

38

Maharashtra between the wars

Provincial reorganisation in British India Since the early nineteenth century, the Marathi-speaking portions of India had been divided between British-administered Bombay and the Central Provinces, as well as the Indian princely state of Hyderabad. All three were polyglot provinces, consisting of sizeable numbers of linguistic groups. As well as Marathi-speaking western Maharashtra, Bombay contained sizeable Gujarati- and Kannada-speaking communities. This rather haphazard administrative division was also reflected in the arrangement of many of the other provinces in colonial India, as they were shaped by the gradual, piecemeal and often indirect expansion of British territorial control during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The imperatives of colonial rule also determined the first major territorial reshuffle of the twentieth century. In 1905, Viceroy Curzon decided to partition Bengal Presidency, which had long been perceived to be a too large and unwieldy administrative unit. Resentment amongst the Hindu Bengali middle class at the partition, which was interpreted as a direct attack on their influence, stimulated the emergence of the Swadeshi Movement, which encouraged the use of homegrown products at the expense of British goods.69 The movement also placed emphasis on the territory of Bengal as a focus for loyalty. This was perhaps most evident in the song Bande Mataram, where the land was reimagined and sanctified as both Durga and Lakshmi, major female Hindu deities.70 Such passion for an imagined homeland echoed elements of the regional sentiments evident in the contemporaneous Ganapati and Shivaji festivals inaugurated by Tilak in Bombay. In the face of such strident opposition, the British ultimately reversed their decision to partition in 1911. This paved the way for the reorganisation of administrative boundaries in northeast India broadly on linguistic lines in the following year. Rather than separating Bengali speakers again, the Bengal Presidency was now divided into three relatively homogeneous linguistic provinces – Assam, Bengal, and Bihar and Orissa. The consequences of this episode were central to the decision of Montagu and Chelmsford, in their report of 1919, to theoretically accept the plausibility of provincial reorganisation on linguistic lines. Drawing upon this precedent, they recognised that ‘the business of government would be simplified if administrative units were both smaller and more homogeneous’ and, as a result, the state would become more accountable to ‘the natural affinities or wishes of the people’.71 Despite providing recognition to such claims, no further attempts at reorganisation were made in the 1920s. But perhaps the more far-reaching impact of the 1919 reforms for notions of regional belonging was the devolution of power to provincial governments. For an array of scholars working in the 1970s and 1980s, often collectively referred to as the ‘Cambridge School’, greater financial and legislative self-government in the 13 provinces of British India had encouraged the ‘provincialisation’ of Indian politics, as a range of competing political patrons, factions and interests were now able to extend their networks of power and influence beyond the locality.72 These works tended to invest initiative in the slow divulgence of greater forms of self-government by the colonial authorities, whilst Indians themselves

Maharashtra between the wars

39

appeared as mere mimic men, incapable of initiative and lacking in serious historical agency beyond the egotistical politics of self-interest.73 Equally, their primary concern with tracing how networks of patronage converged at the all-India level tended to present municipal, district and provincial politics ‘as an increasingly inconsequential sideshow to the anti-colonial struggle as it unfolded at the national level’.74 However, if we move away from their principal foci, we can note the increased importance of the province to political parties and their representatives during the interwar years, particularly as ‘provincialisation’ intersected with the extension of the franchise and procedures of representative government. As a consequence, the provincial administrative arena came to be increasingly connected to community and number, providing an additional component to ideas about communal majorities and minorities in the provinces in a period of gradual democratisation. It is critical, therefore, as David Gilmartin has suggested in a slightly different, albeit related, context, to bring into the narrative the British devolution of power to the provinces in the period after 1919, a process that had as much influence on the dynamics of the debates leading to partition [and more generally, we might say, other demands for regional autonomy that emerged at the time of independence] as did an earlier British policy of “divide and rule” tied to religion.75 The centrality of provincialisation to various emerging ideas about the nature of government in an independent India is evident if we turn to the next round of constitutional reform, first initiated by the appointment of the Indian Statutory Commission in 1927. The Indian Statutory Commission, known as the Simon Commission after its head Sir John Simon, was composed entirely of British members of the House of Commons and Lords. The lack of Indian representation meant that when the Commission arrived in India in early 1928, they received a hostile welcome from a number of Indian political parties. Some individuals decided to help the Commission’s inquiries, including non-Brahman and Dalit representatives from Bombay. However, Congressmen, as well as representatives of the Muslim League, Liberals and the Hindu Mahasabha, decided to boycott the Commission and organised an All Parties Conference instead. The Conference met in February and May 1928, and appointed the Nehru Committee to draft an alternative constitution to the Simon Commission. The Nehru Report, mainly the work of the Liberal politician T. B. Sapru and the Congressman Motilal Nehru, suggested that India should immediately attain the same status as the white self-governing dominions within the British Empire.76 The Report also recognised the benefits of provincial reorganisation, noting that the prevalence of English as the ‘neutral’ language of government in multilingual and multicultural provinces, ‘a language which most of the people outside do not understand’, meant that ‘responsible Government [was] . . . a farce’.77 Simultaneously, however, the Report rejected the further devolution of power to the provinces, which its authors perceived to threaten the growth of a wider

40

Maharashtra between the wars

national consciousness. This concern owed something to the recognition of the importance of territory, particularly as it intersected with emerging ideas about the meaning of democracy and democratic conduct. For certain communities, provincial reorganisation was a tool through which to grasp political power. In debates preceding the publication of the Report in August 1928, M. A. Jinnah, representing Muslim interests, had promised to give up the demand for separate electorates in return for the creation of the Muslim-majority province of Sind, provincial status for the Muslim-majority areas of Baluchistan and the Northwest Frontier Provinces (which were ruled directly by the British at the centre under a Chief Commissionership), proportional representation in the Muslim-majority provinces of Punjab and Bengal, and the reservation of a third of seats in the Central Legislature for Muslims.78 Known as the Delhi Muslim Proposals, these demands might be seen to represent the territorialisation of number, as a precursor to the development of the Pakistan demand in the 1940s. Some Muslim representatives intended for a Muslim-majority province to counter Hindu dominance elsewhere in India, and allow for parity between Hindus and Muslims at the federal centre. Although the AICC had initially accepted the Delhi Muslim Proposals, they were ultimately rejected by the Nehru Committee under pressure from members of the Hindu Mahasabha. However, the new GOI Act of 1935, which emerged from the convoluted process of constitutional negotiations, did recognise a significant element of the League’s demands.79 In Bombay, the British accepted the necessity of creating the separate Muslim-majority province of Sind, despite the opposition of Sindhispeaking Hindus and Hindu nationalist parties. The All India Hindu Conference, for example, passed a resolution expressing ‘its strong indignation’ at, the desire of the Muslims to have Sind Hindus as hostages for the good behaviour of Hindu majorities in their provinces, and records its conviction that the creation of new provinces with a view to give a majority to any particular community is fraught with grave danger to India’s national unity, and should be opposed by every true nationalist.80 As the All India Hindu Conference’s resolution made clear, under the new constitutional arrangements number was being territorialised in the apparent interests of different communities. The creation of Sind would provide Muslims with the status of the majority community in the province, when compared with their minority status in Bombay as a whole. This decision reflected one dimension of a broader discussion about the wholesale reorganisation of provincial boundaries in Bombay, which was also being considered during this period. In April 1931, for example, the Samyukta Karnatak (United Karnatak) newspaper published an editorial demanding the reorganisation of the province on linguistic lines. The authors suggested that the provincial government had historically neglected the demands of the Kannada-speaking people of Bombay, and that ‘The only way to solve the problem is to unify all the Kanarese-speaking people into one province to be known as the united Karnatak’.81 Although the creation of Karnataka was not included in the 1935 reforms, these claims continued to be voiced by Kannada

Maharashtra between the wars

41

speakers for the remainder of the interwar period and after. The demand for Samyukta Maharashtra, by comparison, was relatively tardy, voiced by Marathi literary and cultural organisations since the 1920s, but not a prominent part of policymaking amongst Maharashtrian politicians until the impending advent of independence during the early 1940s. However, as the next chapter demonstrates in more detail, these claims were also premised on an understanding of democracy as a form of majoritarianism, which echoed the inter-linkages between territory, number and community that had been established during the constitutional negotiations and reforms of the interwar years.

A Shudra/Ati-Shudra alliance? The assumption that democracy would exist as a form of majoritarianism, whether on the basis of caste or language in western India, had a number of important implications for Maharashtra’s Dalit population. Dalit, literally meaning ‘ground down’, ‘suppressed’ or ‘broken to pieces’, has come to serve as the preferred designation of India’s ‘untouchables’, who were (and continue to be) exploited, degraded and dehumanised by the caste Hindu order. In Maharashtra, the Mahar and Mang castes are both the largest demographic and politically most prominent Dalit groups. During the nineteenth century, members of the Mahar caste began to contest both the concept of untouchability and the idea that Dalits constituted part of the Hindu community. As part of this strategy, they engaged with Jotirao Phule’s radical critique of Brahmanic Hinduism and the caste system. In fact, Phule had actively encouraged Dalit participation in the nascent non-Brahman movement, incorporating them within his all-embracing, majoritarian conception of the bahujan samaj. For Phule, this majority community was built on a common alliance between Shudras (low-caste non-Brahmans) and Ati-Shudras (Dalits), which transcended caste hierarchies and particularisms by emphasising their shared Dravidian (pre-Aryan) heritage. As Anupama Rao has pointed out, Phule’s history reserved ‘an exceptional role for the downtrodden, the Mahars and Mangs, who had offered the strongest resistance to the Aryan-Brahmin invaders’.82 It was as a consequence of such defiance that the ultimately successful Brahman invaders had reserved their harshest punishment for these sections of pre-Aryan society, defining them as untouchables and expelling them from human society. The 1920s: commonalities and incongruities The Satyashodhak Samaj and other non-Brahman organisations were amongst the most prominent advocates of Dalit reform throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. One of the key proponents of such initiatives was Shahu II, who played an important role in sponsoring Dalit education, as well as supporting demands for Dalit separate electorates and bureaucratic reservations. Shahu also began to adopt a more radical position on social issues, and aimed to break down caste stigmas by participating in inter-dining with Dalit groups.83 Meanwhile V. R. Shinde, a leading non-Brahman social reformer, organised initiatives through the

42

Maharashtra between the wars

Depressed Classes Mission (established 1906), and successfully campaigned for the Congress to pass a resolution that denounced the practice of untouchability in 1917. Shinde also organised efforts at Dalit education, creating a number of day, Sunday and industrial schools in the cities of Poona, Bombay and Ahmednagar. Amongst Dalits, alliances with radical non-Brahmans were also perceived as an effective tactic in breaking down caste hierarchies. B. R. Ambedkar, the leading Dalit spokesman in Maharashtra during the interwar years, supported a broader shudra-ati-shudra alliance during the 1920s, particularly with regards to increased access to government jobs amongst these groups. During his evidence before the Southborough Committee on the franchise ahead of the 1919 reforms, Ambedkar also argued that special provision should be provided for the Marathas, as well as Bombay Province’s Dalit population.84 Equally, both non-Brahman and Dalit activists were involved in campaigns to gain better access to social spaces and civic facilities, such as water tanks, roads and Hindu temples, during the late 1920s and early 1930s.85 This formed the basis for an assertion of their civic rights, complementing the simultaneous focus on the right to representation in a formal, political dimension, and serving as one part of a broader bundle of rights that would be constitutive of their citizenship in a democratising system. In Kolaba District, for example, groups of Bhandaris, Kolis and Agris (all non-Brahman castes) attempted to enter temples in September 1927 and March 1928, against the wishes of the local Brahmans.86 In the same district, meanwhile, Dalits had employed non-violent action (satyagraha) in both May and December 1927, to realise their right to take water from the Chavdar tank in the town of Mahad. This could, on occasion, bring Dalits and Marathas together. Ambedkar recounted an incident at Raigarh where the watchman of the Raigarh dharmashala (religious rest-house), a Maratha by caste, ‘Not only . . . did not prevent us from taking water from the Ganga Sagar tank, but he actually gave us big pots to fetch the water, and this with full knowledge that we belonged to the untouchable classes’.87 However, attempts at Dalit assertion through temple entry and access to government and public property much more frequently raised resentment and antipathy amongst non-Brahmans. In April 1930, for example, non-Brahmans in Nasik distributed leaflets opposing the right of Dalits to enter the city’s Kalaram temple.88 And in September 1931, ‘a fracas occurred between the Maratha villagers and the untouchables, when the latter attempted to take a procession of their holy book through the village’ of Mukhed in Nasik District.89 These tensions over temple entry frequently spilt over into other antagonisms between the two communities in rural western India, particularly as Dalits were often employed as labourers and menials by Maratha landholders. As part of a broader effort to overcome their degraded status, many Dalits now refused to complete their ‘hereditary’ menial and stigmatised tasks, such as the burying of dead cattle. In response, in a number of villages in Ratnagiri District, Maratha villagers threatened Dalits ‘that unless they do continue to perform these duties they will prohibit them (the Mahars) from tending cattle and collecting grass in the lands held by them (the Marathas)’.90 By October, the tensions between non-Brahmans and Dalits had reached such a level

Maharashtra between the wars

43

in Nasik that Patitpavan Das, President of the local Untouchables’ Satyagraha Committee, addressed a letter to the non-Brahman leader Dinkarrao Javalkar, ‘requesting him to tour the Nasik District with a view to enlisting the sympathy of Marathas in the Satyagraha which is shortly to be resumed’. According to Patitpavan Das, ‘opposition to the Satyagrahas, resulting in assaults on the Untouchables, is chiefly encountered from the Maratha who, he alleges, seem to have been egged on by the Brahmins’.91 Non-Brahman, and particularly Maratha, resentment at Dalit assertion in this period was primarily predicated on the distinctions between ‘touchable’ and ‘untouchable’ castes. In fact, Phule had also been aware of rifts within the bahujan samaj, and had explained them as part of cunning Brahman efforts to divide nonBrahmans and Dalits. The reimagining of Maratha history, away from Phule’s conception of the shared racial origins of Dalits and non-Brahmans, and towards an exclusivist Aryan/Kshatriya identity based on elite status instead, discouraged cooperation between the two communities. Perhaps it was this turn towards religious orthodoxy that also provided the context in which Patitpavan Das was able to note the complicity between Brahman and non-Brahman in their efforts to undermine Dalit assertion.92 According to this logic, it was only those with a pure Aryan heritage who could be invested with the sacred thread and complete other Vedic rituals, enter temples and bathe in certain ghats. In doing so, Marathas became complicit in imitating Brahmanic mores, contrary to the radical stance adopted by both Phule and his ideological successor, Ambedkar. In fact, around the same time that the non-Brahmans were attempting to reassert their superior position within a hierarchical caste order, Ambedkar was dismissing its validity, burning sections of the Hindu sacred text the Manusmriti, which referred to the punishment and social exclusion of both women and Shudras. Despite his attempts to reach out to non-Brahmans and develop a common alliance in the early 1920s, Ambedkar had long demonstrated ambivalence towards non-Brahman assertion. In his evidence before the Southborough Committee, for example, he opined, “The intellectual and social domination of the Brahmins” is not a matter that affects the non-Brahmins alone. It affects all and is therefore the interest of all. What remains then as a special interest for the non-Brahmins to require their protection?93 Instead, Ambedkar increasingly emphasised the distinctions between caste Hindus (including non-Brahmans) and Dalits by focusing on the particularly stigmatised and materially deprived existence of the latter. For him, the word ‘untouchable’ was symptomatic of their specific ills, in which the caste order was predicated around the systematic exclusion of Dalits.94 This distinction consequently informed their composition as a separate constituent element in the body politic. Ambedkar and other Dalit representatives in western India frequently engaged with, challenged and questioned an understanding of democracy in this period as a form of commensuration instead, capable of remedying their suffering at the hands of the

44

Maharashtra between the wars

Hindu majority. In doing so, they encouraged a vision of the Dalit community as a distinctive political minority. Drawing upon this logic, Dalit representatives began to suggest special forms of representation for the Dalit minority. During the late 1920s, the Mahar Seva Sangh favoured the creation of separate electorates, whilst Ambedkar, arguing that ‘communal representation and self-determination are but two different phrases which express the same notion’, advocated reserved representation within a universal adult franchise.95 Both argued that representation would help equalise Dalit’s political inadequacies when measured against the Hindu majority, taking account of both their demographic minority and disadvantaged socio-economic status. In fact, despite constituting the same proportion of the population as Bombay’s Muslims, the Dalits had only one nominated (rather than directly elected) representative in the provincial legislature at any one time during the 1920s, compared to 29 Muslim members.96 Ambedkar and Dalit politics during the 1930s We have already seen how, during the 1920s, a fragile alliance between nonBrahmans and Dalits was put under increased strain as a consequence of greater Dalit socio-political assertion, non-Brahman (particularly Maratha) conservatism, and an amplification of the distinctions between ‘touchable’ and ‘untouchable’. But the growing prominence of territorial considerations during the 1930s increased concern amongst Dalit representatives about their status in an independent India. Ahead of the next round of constitutional reforms, Ambedkar altered his stance on separate representation for the Dalits. Invited to represent the viewpoint of India’s Dalits during negotiations in the early 1930s, he urged the creation of separate electorates for them on the basis of both their minority and deprived status. This was encompassed within Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s Communal Award in August 1932. In Bombay Province (excluding Sind), the Depressed Classes were allocated ten seats in a separate electorate. Upon hearing of the Award, Gandhi promised to undertake a fast-unto-death, beginning on 20 September, which would only end if the government withdrew their scheme for separate electorates for the ‘untouchables’. For Gandhi, the Depressed Classes constituted a subset of Hindu society, in which the removal of untouchability was a religious, rather than political, issue, to be rectified internally by the Hindu community and without the intrusion of the colonial state. Under pressure from the possibility of Gandhi’s death, Ambedkar was harried into altering his position on separate electorates. The Poona Pact compromise that resulted saw the creation of 148 reserved seats for untouchables, but within a general electorate of Hindus. These provisions were incorporated within the GOI Act of 1935. The prevailing concern amongst a spectrum of political opinion – Liberal, Nehruvian, Gandhian and conservative Hindu – was the threat that separate electorates posed to the idea of achieving a political majority and uniform civic identity within a liberal democratic system. The decision to create separate electorates for Muslims and other ‘minority’ religious communities had done much to embed the idea that India was a primarily Hindu nation, in which the ‘General’ constituencies were

Maharashtra between the wars

45

equated with Hindu representation. In this telling, the workings of democratic liberalism came to be equated with Hindu majoritarianism, in which ‘a language of universal rights focused on the upper-caste, elite Hindu man’.97 Ambedkar’s rather different stance on separate electorates for the Depressed Classes, as a distinct group within Hinduism, worthy of separate representation on the basis of their material exploitation and socioreligious stigmatisation, potentially undermined this idea of religious community as constituency. Ambedkar had planned to use the separate electorate ‘to reveal the latent power of the Depressed Classes to withhold consent to Hindu hegemony’ and make ‘caste Hindus “dependent upon the votes of the Untouchables”’.98 For caste Hindus, on the other hand, the Hindu identity of the Scheduled Castes was key to maintaining their position as the majority demographic community, and preventing the disintegration of India into a nation of minorities. These concerns were replicated at the provincial level amongst non-Brahman representatives. As the Collector of Ahmadnagar noted in October 1932, in response to the reservation of seats for Dalits encompassed within the Poona Pact, ‘One or two Maratha leaders feared that Marathas though they formed the biggest community in the Deccan districts, are in danger of being converted into a minority in Council on account of special weightage given to Minorities’.99 It is clear that within Marathi-speaking districts, democracy as a form of majoritarianism was coming to be increasingly invoked in the interests of the Maratha community. Special dispensation for Dalits threatened to eat into the proportion of seats the Marathas could win within the General constituency at the district and provincial level, thereby potentially depriving them of majority representation in Marathispeaking areas. Opposition to separate electorates and the confrontation with Gandhi meant Ambedkar felt increasingly disenchanted with the potential for Dalit amelioration through Hindu reformism. In October 1935 he made the profound announcement that although he had been born a Hindu, he would not die a Hindu.100 He also returned to emphasising the significance of a broader shudra-ati-shudra alliance, capable of representing peasant and working-class interests across the Marathispeaking districts. The Independent Labour Party (ILP), formed in August 1936, was envisaged as a ‘labour party’, in contradistinction to the capitalist Congress, capable of encompassing both non-Brahmans and Dalits within its remit. This was, in Gail Omvedt’s words, Ambedkar’s ‘radical period’, during which he ‘consistently argued for left and non-brahman/dalit forces to come together to form a political alternative that would fight both the Indian ruling classes and imperialism’.101 Part of this policy was premised on trying to counter the gradual shift of Maratha support towards the Congress. After the party had decided to contest seats, the 1937 elections were a major triumph for the Congress, and they had gone on to form ministries in seven out of the 11 provinces of British India. In the Marathispeaking districts of Bombay, the results had ensured that the Non-Brahman Party suffered a serious, and ultimately terminal, setback. However, the ILP won 11 out of the 15 reserved seats in the province, and emerged as the main opposition to the new Congress government.

46

Maharashtra between the wars

One of the main strategies employed by Ambedkar and the ILP to wean nonBrahman support away from the Congress was to focus on the oft-exploitative relationships that existed between employer and employee, factory owner and worker, landlord and tenant, and creditor and debtor. Congress was characterised as the party of the elites in all of these scenarios. It helped that, on occasion, these distinctions could be drawn on the basis of regional community identities. Gandhi, for example, could be presented as from an elite family of traders (banias) in Gujarat. In a speech at Islampur in April 1938, Ambedkar pressed the Marathas to join the ILP rather than the Congress, by invoking their shared hostility towards the Marwari or Gujarati shetji (trader): ‘The Marwaris and the Gujaratis, extorting exorbitant interest and extracting money from you by dishonestly taking your thumb impressions – all such people are to be found in the Congress ranks’.102 In another speech at Mahad in January 1939, he proclaimed, ‘At present the Gujaratis are ruling over us. Out of the three crores of rupees received from the Government of India [by the Government of Bombay], nearly two crores were spent on Gujarat the richest of the three divisions of the Province of Bombay’.103 In making these distinctions, Ambedkar presented a shared sense of ‘Maharashtrian-ness’, capable of transcending caste division and organised in contradistinction to other regional/linguistic groups. Despite Ambedkar’s best efforts, his attempts to appeal to a broader Shudra-AtiShudra alliance after the Poona Pact failed to gain much traction. It did not help that Marathas had been amongst the most virulent opponents to Dalit temple entry and their use of public spaces since the late 1920s. These caste conflicts continued into the next decade, particularly in the context of the perceived threat to Maratha assertion as a consequence of reserved seats for Dalits within the Poona Pact. In fact, as the previous section of this chapter made clear, a collective notion of Maharashtrian identity was actually more likely to be articulated in terms of an alliance between Marathas and Brahmans within the Maharashtra PCC, which informed the majoritarian demands for linguistic reorganisation during the 1940s. As the next chapter reveals in greater detail, this left Ambedkar and the Dalit population in Maharashtra (as well as India more generally) in something of a quandary. Faced with the potential threat of both Hindu and Maratha majoritarianism at either the all-India or provincial level, Ambedkar and other Dalit ideologues turned to territorial separation as the most viable alternative, drawing upon the rhetoric of ‘separateness’ embodied within the Pakistan demand. As a minority community, Dalits were ultimately unable to transform their status to that of a territorially concentrated majority (or nationality) at the moment of postcolonial transition.

Conclusion Unlike Ambedkar and the Dalit population of western India, Maharashtra’s nonBrahmans were able to draw upon their preponderate numbers within Marathispeaking districts to validate their understanding of democracy as a form of majoritarianism. As this chapter has revealed, the increasing significance of number, within a system of government that was gradually democratising, allowed the Marathas to abandon their demands for separate electorates during the interwar

Maharashtra between the wars

47

period, in favour of the creation of a separate province for Marathi speakers. It was envisaged that linguistic reorganisation would create provincial administrative and legislative arenas dominated by Marathas, who would be able to shape the provincial state’s policies and distribute its resources in their own self-interest. In this sense, it replicated an understanding of the linkages between democracy, community and territory that were also evident within certain interpretations of the Pakistan demand. Both sought to redraw boundaries to reconfigure the balance of power between supposedly discrete and homogeneous communities constructed on a demographic basis. Yet, Maratha majoritarianism in the province also shared common tropes with the idea of Hindu majoritarianism at the centre, particularly as Marathas sought to claim high-caste Kshatriya status through the patriarchal practices of marathmola. Both were thereby premised on the idea that the democratic language of universal rights would be concentrated on the upper-caste, elite Hindu man. In the process, Phule’s older egalitarianism, evident within his conception of the bahujan samaj and founded on the basis of the shared antipathies of all nonBrahman and Dalit communities towards Brahmanic supremacy, was ultimately undermined. Maratha dominance within the ‘Maratha and Allied Caste’ category caused friction and tension amongst non-Brahmans, whilst increased Dalit assertion and growing Maratha conservatism undercut Ambedkar’s efforts to establish a broad-based alliance between urban and rural labour in Maharashtra during the 1930s. In fact, both Marathas at the provincial level and Hindus at the all-India level articulated concerns about the reservation of seats for Dalits encompassed within the Poona Pact because they threatened to diminish the returns for both communities within the ‘General’ constituency. Such a reaction to the Poona Pact also helped inform and fortify an uneasy alliance between Maharashtrian Brahmans and non-Brahmans by the 1930s, particularly as Marathas gradually took control of the provincial Congress. Brahman Congressman, such as N. V. Gadgil, were aware that the trend towards democratisation meant that an alliance was necessary with Maharashtra’s non-Brahman population if the influence of Brahmans upon both the party and the polity were not to be diminished. As a consequence, references to a shared language and regional history, based around the idea of the stereotypical ‘Marathi manus’, became increasingly commonplace at this time. These shared regional affinities were even more important when placed in a context of provincialisation and emerging ideas about the nature of government in an independent India, serving as a precursor to the demand for Samyukta Maharashtra. A palpable political shift therefore occurred amongst non-Brahmans during the interwar years, from demands for separate representation on the basis of their community’s backwardness, to demands for a separate province on the basis of their numerical preponderance. This also provides an insight into different conceptions of democracy that were in contemporary circulation, and specifically delineates the move from an understanding of democracy as a form of commensuration towards one which privileged democracy as a form of majoritarianism amongst the region’s Maratha population, instead. Despite the fact that an expanding

48

Maharashtra between the wars

franchise and the gradual democratisation of representative government were ostensibly framed on the basis of individual rights, the continuing significance accorded to community by both colonial administrators and indigenous political actors meant that it came to be politicised as constituency at this time. This chapter has suggested that these complex political changes help explain why the advent of liberal democracy in postcolonial India, framed around the individual rightsbearing citizen, failed to eradicate, and in many cases entrenched in new ways, the importance of community for citizens’ interactions with the state. It is towards an idea of the relationship between state and society, as embodied within the demand for Samyukta Maharashtra, that the next chapter now turns.

Notes 1 Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009, pp. 18–20. 2 Taylor Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India: Negotiating Citizenship in Postcolonial Hyderabad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 4. 3 These post-Second World War developments, and the similarities and conjunctures between the demands for Pakistan and Samyukta (i.e. ‘united’) Maharashtra, are dealt with in much greater detail in Chapter 3. 4 John Gallagher and Anil Seal, ‘Britain and India between the Wars’, Modern Asian Studies [henceforth MAS], 15.3 (1981), 387–414 (p. 399). 5 David Olusoga, The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire, London: Head of Zeus, 2014, p. 412; see also, David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–1918, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. 6 James Chiriyankandath, ‘Democracy under the Raj: Elections and Separate Representation in British India’, in Democracy in India, ed. by Niraja Gopal Jayal, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 53–81 (p. 59). 7 Out of the 11 indirectly elected members, ten represented landholder and commercial interests, and one represented Bombay University. See His Majesty’s Government, Report of the Indian Statutory Commission, London: n.p., 1930, pp. 144–145, 167–168. 8 Judith Brown, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004 [1994], pp. 205–208; Peter Robb, The Government of India and Reform: Policies towards Politics and the Constitution, 1916–1921, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976, pp. 112–113. 9 Ranajit Guha, ‘Discipline and Mobilize’, in Subaltern Studies VII: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. by Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 69–120 (p. 71). 10 Rao, The Caste Question, p. 19. 11 Ibid.; see also, Cyril L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, London: Penguin, 2001 [1938]. 12 Anne Feldhaus, The Religious System of the Mahanabhuva Sect: The Mahanabhuva Sutrapatha, New Delhi: Ramesh Jain, 1983, pp. 57–68; Gail Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non-Brahman Movement in Western India, 1873 to 1930, Bombay: Scientific Socialist Education Trust, 1976, pp. 53–54; Christopher A. Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 22–25. 13 Rosalind O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 [1985], p. 7.

Maharashtra between the wars

49

14 Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, pp. 57–75. 15 Bal Gangadhar Tilak, The Arctic Home in the Vedas, Being Also a New Key to the Interpretation of Many Vedic Texts and Legends, Poona: Messrs Tilak Brothers, 1903. 16 O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology, p. 136. 17 Ibid., p. 174. 18 Rao, The Caste Question, p. 13. 19 Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society, pp. 137–138. 20 Cf. James M. Campbell and Reginald E. Enthoven, Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Calcutta: Government Central Press, 1899. 21 Stewart Gordon, The Marathas, 1600–1818, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 14–17. 22 Reginald E. Enthoven, The Tribes and Castes of Bombay, Volume II, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1922, p. 286. 23 Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘The Social Worth of Scribes: Brahmins, Kayasthas and the Social Order in Early Modern India’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review [henceforth IESHR], 47 (2010), 563–595 (p. 568). 24 Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘Cultural Pluralism, Empire and the State in Early Modern South Asia: A Review Essay’, IESHR, 44 (2007), 363–381 (pp. 371–372); O’Hanlon, ‘The Social Worth of Scribes’, p. 588. 25 Shudras, meanwhile, were only entitled to rites drawn from the less sacred Puranas. See O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology, p. 17; Uma Chakravarti, Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai, New Delhi: Zubaan, 1998, pp. 54–55. 26 Robert M. Betham, Handbooks for the Indian Army: Marathas and Dekhani Musalmans Compiled under the Orders of the Government of India, Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1908, p. 10. 27 Rosalind O’Hanlon, A Comparison between Women and Men: Tarabai Shinde and the Critique of Gender Relations in Colonial India, Madras: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 23–24. 28 Ibid., pp. 29–30. 29 O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology, pp. 140, 162–163, 265–266. 30 Reginald E. Enthoven, ‘Table XIII: Caste, Tribe, Race or Nationality’, in Census of India, 1901, Volume IX-B, Part III: Bombay: Provincial Tables, ed. by Reginald E. Enthoven, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1902, pp. 168–243. 31 Herbert T. Sorley, ‘Imperial Table XVII: Caste, Tribe, Race or Nationality’, in Census of India, 1931, Volume VIII, Part II: Bombay Presidency: Statistical Tables, ed. by A. H. Dracup and Herbert T. Sorley, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1933, pp. 412–443; Herbert T. Sorley, Census of India, 1931, Volume IX: The Cities of Bombay Presidency, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1933, pp. 39–40. 32 ‘Backward Classes in the Bombay Deccan and Indian Constitutional Reform Proposals’, 28 July 1918, no. 12 in Reform Proposals: Indian Deputations to Crew Committee, Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics. Quoted in Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society, p. 185. 33 Ibid. 34 ‘Memorandum Submitted by All-India Mahratta League to the Parliamentary Select Joint Committee Appointed to Consider the Indian Constitution Reforms Bill, 1919’. Quoted in Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society, p. 187. 35 NAI, GOI, Reforms Office File 130–148(b), ‘Demi-Official Letter from the Hon’ble Mr. C. N. Seddon, Reforms Commissioner, Bombay, to S. P. O’Donnell, Esq., C.I.E., Secretary to the GOI, Reforms Department’, 23 March 1920. 36 Deccan Ryot, 22 May 1919. Quoted in Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society, p. 187.

50

Maharashtra between the wars

37 Mumbai, Maharashtra State Archives [henceforth MSA], Government of Bombay [henceforth GOB], Reforms Office File 142 I, ‘Sir John Heaton’s Award’, 28 April 1920. 38 The Reforms Committee (Franchise), Evidence Taken before the Reforms Committee (Franchise), Volume II: Bengal, Madras, Bombay, Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1919, p. 683. 39 Bhimrao R. Ambedkar, quoted in NAI, GOI, Reforms Office File 5–36 F, ‘Written Statement containing the representation to the Indian Delimitation Committee with reference to the final proposals of the Bombay Provincial Delimitation Committee and of the Government submitted through the Chief Secretary to the Government, Political and Reforms Department, by Mr. A.N. Surve, Member of Legislative Council [henceforth MLC]’, n.d. 40 MSA, GOB, Home (Special) Department File 363(3), ‘Letter from the Collector of Satara to the Secretary to the Government, Home Department’, “Special Report on Affairs at Vita”’, 5 September 1925. 41 Ibid., File 363(5), ‘Letter from Commissioner, Central Division, to Secretary to Government, Home Department’, 28 December 1927. 42 Indian Statutory Commission, Simon Commission Report on India (Indian Statutory Commission), Volume VII: Memorandum Submitted by the Government of Bombay, London: H.M.S.O., 1930, pp. 481–484. 43 One seat became a general seat ‘because no Maratha candidate came forward’. NAI, GOI, Reforms Office File 5–36 F, ‘Written Statement to the Indian Delimitation Committee by Mr. A.N. Surve, Member of Legislative Council’, n.d. 44 MSA, GOB, Reforms Office File 142 II, ‘Resolutions Passed by Allied Castes’ Conference, Bombay Presidency, in Second Session Held at Poona’, 20 November 1932. 45 NAI, GOI, Reforms Office File 5–36 F, ‘Letter from A.N. Surve to the Reforms Commissioner to the GOI’, 20 December 1935. 46 MSA, GOB, Reforms Office File 46/I, ‘Resolutions of Fourth Session of the Bombay Provincial Non-Brahman Conference Held at Shahabai (Kolaba District)’, 2 May 1931. 47 S.J.M. Epstein, The Earthy Soil: Bombay Peasants and the Indian Nationalist Movement 1919–1947, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 2–3, 37–38. 48 Mohandas K. Gandhi, ‘The Congress Constitution’, 3 November 1920, in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Electronic Book) [henceforth CWMG], Volume 21, New Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India, 1999, p. 443. 49 Mohandas K. Gandhi, ‘Letter to Chairman, All India Congress Committee [henceforth AICC]’, 25 September 1920, in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Electronic Book) [henceforth CWMG], Volume 21, New Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India, 1999, p. 298. 50 Lisa Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009, pp. 11, 14. 51 Ibid., pp. 7, 10. 52 For colonial language aids, see, for example, James Molesworth, Marathi-English Dictionary, Bombay: Bombay Education Society’s Press, 1857. 53 For Gujarati, see Riho Isaka, ‘Gujarati Elites and the Construction of a Regional Identity in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in Beyond Representation: Colonial and Postcolonial Constructions of Indian Identity, ed. by Crispin Bates, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 151–176; for the Hindi heartland, see Vasudha Dalmia, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra and Nineteenth-Century Banaras, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997; Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; for Marathi, see Veena Naregal, Language Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere: Western India under Colonialism, London: Anthem, 2001; for Tamil, see Bernard Bate, Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian

Maharashtra between the wars

54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61

62 63

64 65 66 67 68 69 70

71 72

51

Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South India, New York: Columbia University Press, 2009; Sumathi Ramaswamy, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891–1970, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997; for Telugu, see Rama Sundari Mantena, ‘Vernacular Publics and Political Modernity: Language and Progress in Colonial South India’, MAS, 47.5 (2013), 1678–1705; Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India. Naregal, Language Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere, pp. 119–120. Ibid., pp. 208, 214–215, 231–254. See a similar argument about the embeddedness of hierarchical social and caste relations within an exclusivist conception of Hindi in Francesca Orsini, ‘What Did They Mean by “Public”? Language, Literature and the Politics of Nationalism’, Economic and Political Weekly [henceforth EPW ], 34.7 (1999), 409–416. O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology, p. 170. Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700–1960, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 16. Mahadev G. Ranade, Rise of the Maratha Power, Bombay: Punalekar and Company, 1900, pp. 6–7. Deshpande, Creative Pasts, pp. 128–138. Vishwanath K. Rajwade, ‘Introduction’, in Itihasacharya V.K. Rajwade Samagra Sahitya (Collected Works of V.K. Rajwade), 13 volumes, ed. by Murlidhar B. Shah, Dhule: Itihasacharya V. K. Rajwade Samsodhan Mandal, 1995–1998, Volume X, p. 32. Quoted in ibid., p. 132. Naregal, Language Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere, p. 263. Raminder Kaur, Performative Politics and the Culture of Hinduism: Public Uses of Religion in Western India, London: Anthem, 2005, pp. 3–4, 32–69; Richard I. Cashman, The Myth of the Lokamanya: Tilak and Mass Politics in Maharashtra, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975; Daniel Jasper, ‘Commemorating the “Golden Age” of Shivaji in Maharashtra, India and the Development of Maharashtrian Public Politics’, Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 31.2 (2003), 215–230. MSA, GOB, Home (Special) Department File 363/3 (1925), ‘Letter from the Collector of Satara to the Secretary to the Government, Home Department’, 5 September 1925. Ibid., File 363/4 II (1926), ‘Full Translation of Deshache Dushman by Oriental Translator’. Deshpande, Creative Pasts, p. 188. For more on this genealogical relationship between region and nation, see Véronique Bénéï, Schooling Passions: Nation, History, and Language in Contemporary Western India, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008, p. 166. Deshpande, Creative Pasts, p. 197. Sumit Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973. See also Sugata Bose, ‘Nation as Mother: Representations and Contestations of “India” in Bengali Literature and Culture’, in Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India, ed. by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 50–75 (pp. 67–68). Government of India, Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms, Calcutta, India: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1918, pp. 159, 28. David A. Washbrook, The Emergence of Provincial Politics: The Madras Presidency 1870–1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 [1976]; John Gallagher, Gordon Johnson, and Anil Seal, eds., Locality, Province and Nation: Essays on Indian Politics 1870 to 1940, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973; Tom B. R. Tomlinson, The Indian National Congress and the Raj, 1929–1942: The Penultimate Phase, London: Macmillan, 1976; Christopher J. Baker and David A. Washbrook, South India: Political Institutions and Political Change 1880–1947, New Delhi: Macmillan, 1976.

52

Maharashtra between the wars

73 Tapan Raychaudhuri, ‘Indian Nationalism as Animal Politics’, Historical Journal, 22 (1979), 747–763; Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, in Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. by Ranajit Guha, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982, pp. 1–8. 74 Prashant Kidambi, ‘Nationalism and the City in Colonial India: Bombay, c.1890– 1940’, Journal of Urban History, 38 (2012), 950–967 (p. 951). 75 David Gilmartin, ‘Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative’, The Journal of Asian Studies [henceforth JAS], 57.4 (1998), 1068–1095 (p. 1073, fn. 3). 76 All Parties Conference, The Nehru Report: An Anti-Separatist Manifesto, New Delhi: Michiko and Panjathan, 1975 [1928]. 77 New Delhi, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library [henceforth NMML], AICC Papers, Part I, File G-72 (1928), ‘Redistribution of Provinces in India’, n.d. 78 Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947, New Delhi: Macmillan, 2002 [1983], p. 262. 79 Some of the further implications of these negotiations and the new GOI Act are discussed in the next section of this chapter. 80 MSA, GOB, Reforms Office File 34 III A, ‘All India Hindu Conference, Resolutions, Sind Separation’, n.d. 81 Ibid., File 34 II, ‘Copy of Paragraph 37 from the Report on Indian Newspapers, 2 May 1931’, ‘The Unification of Karnatak’, Samyukta Karnatak, 30 April 1931. 82 Rao, The Caste Question, p. 45. 83 Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society, pp. 129–130. 84 This, he suggested, should take the form of a ‘low pitched franchise’, meaning the franchise requirements for non-Brahmans would be lower than that for Brahmans. See Bhimrao R. Ambedkar, ‘Evidence before the Southborough Committee’, in Babasaheb Ambedkar Writings and Speeches [henceforth BAWS], Volume I, ed. by Vasant Moon, New Delhi: Dr. Ambedkar Foundation, 2014 [1979], p. 255. 85 Rao, The Caste Question, Chapter 2. 86 MSA, GOB, Home (Special) Department File 363/3, ‘Extract from the Confidential Diary of the District Superintendent of Police, Kolaba’, 24 September 1927; ibid., ‘District Magistrate, Kolaba’, 6 March 1928. 87 ‘Dr. Ambedkar at Raigarh’, Bombay Chronicle (Bombay), 14 January 1928. 88 MSA, GOB, Home (Special) Department File 355/64 IV-A-1, ‘Extract from Times of India’, 7 April 1930. 89 Ibid., File 355/64 IV-A-II, ‘Nasik’, 26 September. 90 Ibid., File 355/64 III, ‘Extract from the Confidential Diary of the District Superintendent of Police, Ratnagiri’, 23 June 1928. 91 ‘Nasik Satyagraha: Untouchables Seek Aid of Marathas’, Times of India (Bombay), 11 October 1931. 92 See also Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 428. 93 Ambedkar, ‘Evidence before the Southborough Committee’, p. 253. 94 Ibid., p. 256. 95 Ibid., p. 270; London, British Library, India Office Records [henceforth IOR], File Q/13/1/5, ‘Memorial on Behalf of all Marathi-Speaking Untouchables of the Bombay Presidency Submitted to Indian Statutory Commission (1927–1928) by Dnyandev Dhruvanath Gholap, President, Satara District Mahar Seva Sangha’, 20 May 1928. 96 Rao, The Caste Question, p. 136. 97 Eleanor Newbigin, The Hindu Family and the Emergence of Modern India: Law, Citizenship and Community, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 8–9; see also Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006, p. 14.

Maharashtra between the wars

53

98 Ambedkar, What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, in BAWS, Volume IX, ed. by Vasant Moon, New Delhi: Dr. Ambedkar Foundation, 2014 [1991], p. 90. Quoted in Rao, The Caste Question, p. 137. 99 MSA, GOB, Reforms Department File 172, ‘Collector, Ahmadnagar’, 10 October 1932. 100 Ibid., Home (Special) Department File 800(40) 4-A, IV B. Pt. I. 101 Gail Omvedt, Dalit Visions: Tracts for the Times/8, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1995, pp. 46–47. 102 MSA, GOB, Home (Special) Department File 927-A, ‘Full Translation of the Speech Made by Dr. Ambedkar at Islampur, District Satara, as Reported by the Bharat Mata’, 27 April 1938. 103 Ibid., File 927-A/I, ‘Extracts from Vividh Vritta and Nava Kal’, 10 January 1939.

3

Plotting out the province Plans and panics over reorganisation

As India gradually inched towards swaraj (‘self-rule’) during the interwar years, new ideas about the nature of Indian freedom and democracy began to emerge in Bombay Province. A range of different politicians, ideologues and writers started to contemplate, plan and fret over what an independent India would actually entail, how the state and democratic governance were likely to function, where its citizens would belong and how their rights would be constituted. This process was to continue in the immediate aftermath of independence and partition, when both the figurative and physical boundaries of the new nation-states had to be sharpened and defined. One of the most important ways in which the future of an independent, democratic India was theorised during this transitional period was to address the demands for the reorganisation of provincial administrative boundaries on linguistic lines. For the proponents of Samyukta Maharashtra, a nascent democracy would only be effectively realised if the ‘mother tongue’ of the Marathi majority was made the official language of a reconstituted Marathi-speaking province. For its detractors, on the other hand, reorganisation threatened India’s fragile unity after partition, and potentially undermined the rights and interests of a number of different minority groups left to reside in these reorganised areas. Amongst these groups, democracy was understood instead as a form of either political commensuration or non-discrimination and individual rights. Both of these readings of democracy rejected the demands for reorganisation as synonymous with the depredations of majority rule. A number of historians and political scientists have previously analysed the developments that led to the linguistic reorganisation of Bombay. Many have paid close attention to the various markers and machinations that precede the point when Bombay was bifurcated into Maharashtra and Gujarat on 1 May 1960. These have included the creation of the Samyukta Maharashtra Parishad (SMP) in 1946, the Linguistic Provinces Commission (LPC) and JVP Committee in 1948, the formation of Andhra province in 1952, the States Reorganisation Commission (SRC) in 1955, the Bombay riots of January 1956, which in turn led to the formation of the Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti (SMS) a month later, and finally the results of the 1957 provincial elections.1 It is thus not my intention to provide here a chronological account of these developments. Instead, this chapter primarily focuses on the ways in which linguistic reorganisation was theorised, both by its

Plotting out the province 55 supporters and opponents, particularly as these ideas intersected with different conceptions of democracy, citizenship and nationality that were developing during this period. In doing so, it also reflects on the synergies between the calls for Samyukta Maharashtra and the Pakistan demand, in an effort to identify and develop wider and more contextualised insights into the various ideas about India’s freedom that were in contemporary circulation.2 These similarities range from the recognition that both called for greater provincial autonomy within a federal India, that demographics and territory were central to both, and that both Jinnah and the leading proponents of Samyukta Maharashtra constantly struggled to present a homogenised sense of a united Muslim or Maharashtrian community. Amongst the supporters of Samyukta Maharashtra, their understanding of democracy as majority rule provided the context for exclusive conceptions of linguistic belonging within the province. As this chapter goes on to demonstrate in greater detail, some of the key ideologues of the movement believed that the provincial units in southern and western India would only be viable if their inhabitants shared a common mother tongue. This precluded individuals who recognised other languages as their mother tongue who resided within the province, and ignored the fact that they also regularly conversed in Marathi during their everyday lives.3 In this understanding, language came to be seen as forging a sense of affective attachment amongst a homogenised community, distinct from other language groups. It was also linked to territory, whereby a linguistic community was seen as intrinsically belonging to the particular space in which they constituted a majority of the population. By creating Maharashtra, Marathi speakers would assume the status of a linguistic majority, with all the privileges such a position within a democratic system potentially entailed. Equally, this intersection between territory, number and belonging provided a space through which community could be equated with nationality. Much like Jinnah’s understanding of the Pakistan demand, these references to a Marathi-speaking nation were not necessarily expressed as demands for secession from the Indian nation as a whole, but were envisaged as an effective strategy through which to garner greater recognition and rights within it. In fact, some supporters of reorganisation argued India’s unity would ultimately be strengthened as a consequence of reorganisation, in which more localised forms of belonging would serve as a precursor to a burgeoning sense of ‘Indian-ness’.4 However, for Nehru and others at the centre, linguistic reorganisation posed a threat to the nation’s unity, primarily because it encouraged alternative sites of allegiance beyond the larger nation-state. Their opposition to reorganisation was premised on a desire to avoid repeating the repercussions of Muslim separatism, in which linguistic sentiment was equated with forms of caste and religious communalism. Such ‘primordial’ identities were pitted against a progressive Nehruvian secularism, which instead envisaged a bright future where the state would be blind to each individual citizen’s religious, linguistic and caste affiliations. Equally, this idea of democracy as non-discrimination was often central to minority opposition to linguistic reorganisation in western India, and particularly amongst Gujarati business elites in Bombay City. Emphasising Bombay City’s cosmopolitan identity, these groups carefully positioned their responses to the demands for

56

Plotting out the province

reorganisation by emphasising the need for both greater national consciousness and a new, secular politics. Despite these commitments, both Nehru and his representatives at the centre, as well as many of the minorities in a would-be Maharashtra, were also prone to arguing against reorganisation in a style that simultaneously recognised democracy as a form of commensuration. The SRC, for example, referred to existing, and recommended additional, constitutional and legal safeguards for linguistic minorities, which ultimately acknowledged the efficacy of linguistic difference. Other minority groups foresaw the enduring problems they faced even if democracy was interpreted as either non-discrimination or commensuration. As Chapter 4 makes clear in greater detail, outside of Nehruvian circles, many Congressmen were instead prone to favouring an understanding of democracy as majority rule. Despite Nehru’s efforts, his understanding of democracy was never institutionalised and often operated against the functioning of both the everyday state and local politics. In an effort to overcome the potential difficulties this majoritarian vision of democracy entailed for the Dalit community of Maharashtra, B. R. Ambedkar instead turned to the idea of territorial separation. This plan was in part premised on the near-contemporary successes of Muslim and Maratha representatives, who had both ultimately seen their communities recognised as separate ‘nations’ through their demands for Pakistan and Samyukta Maharashtra. But whereas these groups were able to claim such status as a consequence of their demographic majority in particular territorial units within the subcontinent, the territorially dispersed nature of the Dalit community revealed the impossibility of their minority status, and meant that they were unable to successfully acquire a similar position in postcolonial India.5 What these various manifestations of minority opposition to reorganisation do point out, however, are the tensions that existed within the supposedly homogeneous depiction of Marathi speakers. Despite attempts by the proponents of Samyukta Maharashtra to portray a unified image of the Maharashtrian community, they were frequently unable to allay the fears of minorities over reorganisation. Maharashtrians ascribed to multiple and varying forms of belonging that cut across and problematised any simplistic depiction of Marathi majority and non-Marathi minority in the region.

The proponents of Samyukta Maharashtra Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the supporters of a unilingual Marathi-speaking province began to flesh out their demands for reorganisation with much greater detail. As independence became a more palpable reality, Maharashtra’s proponents increasingly framed the creation of the province in the context of particular practical and democratic considerations. After 1947, they also argued that linguistic provinces were central to the new and ongoing project of nation building within India. In this view, India would only be truly democratic if its citizens were able to fully comprehend both their own legal rights and the pronouncements and intricate workings of the state. It was generally considered a truism amongst supporters of reorganisation that such comprehension would only materialise if the provincial

Plotting out the province 57 and local administrations conducted their proceedings in the ‘mother tongue’ of the linguistic ‘majority’. As a result, these ideas about the effective workings of democracy in an independent India intersected with exclusive conceptions of linguistic belonging. Under this logic, an individual’s mother tongue was regarded as a primary and natural foundation of emotional attachment, curtailing the multilingual complexities of many citizens’ actual everyday experiences.6 According to most supporters of reorganisation, India was constituted by discrete linguistic groups in competition with one another over access to the state’s resources. Reorganising the provinces would thus create separate spaces of linguistic belonging where it would be expected that citizens would speak only one language. The significance of this affective attachment to the principle of territoriality evinced by the proponents of Samyukta Maharashtra during the 1940s and 1950s also runs parallel to the territorialisation of the Pakistan demand in northeast and northwest India. It therefore provides one example of how demands for provincial autonomy, which widely characterised the gradual transition to independence in South Asia, were envisaged. Linguistic reorganisation, Pakistan, and the postcolonial transition Many who tried to anticipate the composition of postcolonial South Asia did not necessarily imagine the creation of two entirely separate sovereign entities, which were ultimately established on the basis of an ostensible secular/religious dichotomy. In fact, the initial session of the Constituent Assembly in December 1946 discussed India’s future constitution with the recommendations of the Cabinet Mission fresh in their minds. The Cabinet Mission’s plan, made public the previous May, had suggested a ‘three-tiered’ formula for government, whereby an ‘agency’ centre at the summit would have a limited jurisdiction over foreign affairs, defence and communications. Meanwhile, the middle tier would be constituted by ‘groups’, as a form of sub-federation within India. The Mission recommended that three such groups be formed, with two representing the Muslim-majority provinces of the northeast and northwest, and the other representing all the other (primarily Hindu) provinces. This, they hoped, would satisfy the demand for autonomous and powerful separate administrative units on the part of the Muslim League, articulated in the Lahore Resolution of 1940, whilst simultaneously avoiding the breakup of the Indian Union. The final tier would be composed of provinces, which would make up the primary federating units, and would be free to form groups on the basis of territorial contiguity and shared traditions and interests. During the first six months of the Constituent Assembly’s debates, the Congress looked to counter the proposals put forward by the Cabinet Mission, and instead supported the creation of a strong central government. This led to the ultimate decision to accept partition as the only possible solution, bifurcating the provinces of Punjab and Bengal and creating the new nation-state of Pakistan under the 3 June Plan. In December 1946, however, the question of whether India would be partitioned or not had not been resolved. In consequence, the majority of politicians either gave little thought to, or studiously ignored, questions about the

58

Plotting out the province

delimitation of the boundaries between India and Pakistan.7 However, some others had begun to recognise the implications and opportunities that independence provided for the question of territorial demarcation more generally. During the initial session of the Constituent Assembly, for example, the Maharashtrian Congressman B. S. Hiray sponsored a resolution calling for the appointment of a boundary commission for India. Hiray was a keen supporter of Samyukta Maharashtra, and a serving member of the SMP. In the text that accompanied the resolution, he argued that such a commission would ‘afford . . . satisfaction of natural aspirations and consciousness of self-rule and self-determination and establishment of happy relations among the different classes inhabiting the various provinces’.8 In this resolution, Hiray interpreted swaraj as referring to both decolonisation and linguistic reorganisation – both were required for the Marathi-speaking inhabitants of western India to experience the true meaning of full independence and democracy. Boundary demarcation at independence would not be limited to north India, but needed to encompass the entire subcontinent to be a success. Hiray’s resolution dovetailed with comparable sentiments that were simultaneously emerging elsewhere within the Indian subcontinent. In December 1946, Shankarrao Deo convened a Convention on Linguistic and Cultural Provinces, over which Pattabhi Sitaramayya presided. Anticipating the creation of the JVP Committee, Sitaramayya called for the Constituent Assembly to ‘constitute a subcommittee for considering the question of linguistic provinces . . . which should be taken note of before provincial constitutions are framed’.9 Again, this was something to be resolved in tandem with independence, and understood as essential to true democratic governance. These calls were given further substance in a series of pamphlets authored by the noted economist and the first director of the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics at Poona, D. R. Gadgil. During the 1940s and 1950s, Gadgil was the key theorist amongst the supporters of Samyukta Maharashtra and hypothesised about the nature and workings of reorganised provincial units within a larger Indian federation. Like Hiray and Sitaramayya, Gadgil suggested that independence and provincial reorganisation were intertwined procedures – both were necessary for citizens to fully experience democratic swaraj. In his 1947 pamphlet, The Federal Problem in India, Gadgil outlined how the current provincial administrative set-up was not only . . . meaningless but also harmful. A number of these units are so composite in character as to be potential federations in themselves, and in a number of instances there is no homogeneity of sentiment or interest between all their parts.10 For Gadgil, this had important implications for his conception of the democratic process. During the late colonial period, English was still frequently used as the major language of governance in Bombay. This custom was defended on the basis of its necessity in the administration of a multilingual province. However, in another pamphlet, Federating India, published in 1945, Gadgil intimated that ‘if, in the administrative unit constituted, the language of the bulk of the people is not

Plotting out the province 59 also the language of all administration’, than democracy was reduced to ‘a farce’.11 Instead, by reorganising the provinces on a linguistic basis after independence, this ‘handicap to the bulk of the people’ would be eliminated.12 In this interpretation, reorganisation provided protection for the rights and interests of homogenised linguistic communities in their own semi-autonomous territorial entities, in a way that conflated the advent of democracy with a provincialised form of majority rule. Like Hiray’s resolution in the Constituent Assembly, The Federal Problem was written in the context of the Cabinet Mission plan.13 Gadgil’s support for linguistic reorganisation can therefore be seen as part of the wider debates about federalism during this transitional period. This focus on federalism also provides the critical link between the debate about linguistic provinces and the Muslim League’s Pakistan demand, both of which were at times envisaged as demands for regional autonomy within a federal system. Gadgil’s suggestions for federation were capable of encompassing both the Pakistan demand and linguistic reorganisation. In The Federal Problem, he envisaged that the federating units within the Indian Union would be based around, ‘A sense of oneness among peoples because of commonness of history and tradition, race, language or religion’.14 This was an attempt to universalise the territorial element of the Pakistan conundrum, which suggested that the issue of administrative boundaries required modification across an imagined Indian federation, rather than just in the northeast and northwest. Whilst religion would form the basis of demarcation in the north, Gadgil argued that ‘So far as Peninsular India are [sic] concerned . . . religion is not an important dividing or determining factor. The vast majority of the peoples is [sic] Hindu’.15 Instead, the south ‘consists of fairly well marked separate national groups who can easily be distinguished by their common language’.16 In equating linguistic community with nationality in this way, Gadgil was not arguing for the creation of new and separate nation-states on linguistic lines. In fact, the language movements of twentieth-century southern India can be distinguished from the language-based nationalisms that captivated Europe from the late eighteenth century on these grounds. As Lisa Mitchell has pointed out, whilst language-based political movements in India ‘have desired recognition and rights within the existing Indian nation . . . most language-based movements in Europe have either advocated, or actually resulted in, the creation of new nations’.17 Conversely, Gadgil argued that loyalty towards the provincial unit of administration actually played a critical role in engendering feelings of belonging to the larger federation. Gadgil anticipated that, ‘No doubt, in course of time . . . the federation may become the unit that evokes greater loyalty’. Yet, he claimed that ‘this process is itself the result of the attainment of greater homogeneity of interest and feeling among inhabitants of the different federating units’.18 In this sense, his ideas are symptomatic of what Véronique Bénéï has described elsewhere, in the context of pedagogical practices in contemporary Maharashtra, as the ‘genealogical relationship’ between belonging to the region and membership of the nation in Maharashtra, ‘whereby the notion of a Maratha nation is the precondition for the possibility of the Indian nation’.19 It also feeds into a longer history of the linkages between a more localised Maratha patriotism and wider consciousness of an Indian

60

Plotting out the province

identity going back to the eighteenth century. Both Sumit Guha and C. A. Bayly have pointed out how the Maratha polity could sometimes envisage itself as the defender of Hindustan from the depredations of Muslim ‘invaders’. This was part of a wider notion of belonging to a ‘common realm of India’ – Maratha documents of the 1750s, for instance, ‘stated that the Persian and Afghan invasions of India were illegitimate because the kings of Iran and Turan “have never held dominion within Hindustan”’.20 If Gadgil did not raise the spectre of linguistic nationality in south India as part of a secessionist demand, in what context was it invoked? At this juncture, it is instructive to revisit Ayesha Jalal’s insightful approach to the vision of Pakistan as propagated by the leader of the Muslim League, M. A. Jinnah. Jalal questions whether Jinnah ever really wanted to create a separate Muslim state, and instead argues that Jinnah used the idea of Pakistan as a strategic ‘bargaining counter’.21 Central to Jinnah’s articulation of the Pakistan demand was that Muslims constituted a separate nation, albeit one that could be encompassed within a federal India. This allowed Jinnah to place emphasis on the idea of a united Muslim community in opposition to the non-Muslim ‘other’, and thereby disregard ‘the myriad particularistic and fragmentary identities and interests that shaped the lives and experiences of India’s Muslims’.22 At the heart of this depiction was Jinnah’s recognition that he was not, in fact, the ‘sole spokesman’ for India’s Muslims, manifested in the particularly tense relations he experienced with leaders of provincial Muslim politics in Bengal, Punjab and elsewhere. Yet, these Muslim-majority provinces were of the utmost importance to Jinnah’s scheme, because the idea of Pakistan was also ultimately premised on the sense that they would serve as an effective counterweight to the otherwise negligible presence of Muslims in Hindu-majority provinces. In the prescient words of B. R. Ambedkar, this was an ‘“ingenious contrivance” involving “the maintenance of justice and peace by retaliation” and “a system of protection by counterblast against blast; terror against terror and eventually tyranny against tyranny”’.23 In this sense, Muslim nationhood was both territorialised and pitted against other communities. Like Jinnah’s interpretation of the Pakistan demand, Gadgil’s emphasis on nationality was not meant to undermine the idea of a federal India. Instead, it was articulated as both an affective attachment to territory within India, and as an at times ambivalent or antagonistic attitude towards other communities within that territory and the wider federation. Gadgil wrote, A federation is the result of the coming together of units which are conscious of separate identity; the federating units must, therefore, be formed of regions, the people of which are conscious of separate identity, i.e., as distinct from their neighbours.24 In doing so, he proposed that an exclusive sense of linguistic nationality was forged, out of a sense of distinctiveness from and embattlement against other languages within a larger space. Like the Pakistan demand, this sense of a Marathispeaking nation was also based around the territorialisation of number at the

Plotting out the province 61 moment of postcolonial transition.25 The proponents of Samyukta Maharashtra were able to deploy the League’s rhetoric of nationality because they too constituted a demographic majority in certain administrative districts within Bombay. In their view, conflict between linguistic communities in a democratic system required the creation of a separate territorial unit where Marathi speakers would constitute the majority of the population, thereby protecting them from the likelihood of economic and political disadvantage in a composite province. Overcoming the problems of the past? Simultaneously, Gadgil’s ideas for federation were framed on the basis of an inherent unity of interest amongst Marathi speakers, which ignored the myriad tensions and distinctions between them. In the appendix to The Federal Problem in India, for example, Gadgil devised a scheme for creating the federating units: Language and religion have been adopted as the two tests of political homogeneity so that each of the units is the largest possible compact block of a population consisting chiefly of speakers of one language and followers of one religion.26 After establishing himself as the ideologue par excellence of Samyukta Maharashtra, Gadgil was later asked to serve as the chief architect of the SMP’s memorandums to the LPC in 1948 and the SRC in 1954. In this capacity, he continued to emphasise the inherent unity of the Marathi-speaking majority in Maharashtra, which he claimed superseded all other competing notions of belonging at the provincial level. In fact, much of the rest of this chapter points to how tensions in the constitution of the categories that defined linguistic reorganisation were often central to its dynamics. Just as Jinnah struggled to project an image of a unified Muslim community, the SMP had to contend with conflicting pulls from caste, religious and sub-regional allegiances that had also gained enhanced political value during the colonial period.27 One technique was to think with and through these other notions of belonging to inform a wider sense of ‘Maharashtrian-ness’. In its memorandum to the SRC in 1954, the SMP portrayed relations between castes in Maharashtra as both regionally homogeneous and distinct from those occurring elsewhere in India: A caste society cannot be called a single homogeneous society. It is a stratified society, but the structure of the stratified caste societies is not the same all over the country. The particular constitution of the strata, their relative positions and relations are all different from region to region. Within each region, however, they are all the same. In this sense regional societies are uniform within a region and differentiated between region and region. A uniformity of social structure is to be found within the region of speakers of one language at least in South and West India. Linguistic groups thus form in effect separate stratified societies.28

62

Plotting out the province

The final sentence reveals how the SMP presented language as key to the distinctive composition and character of caste society across different parts of India. The memorandum went on to elaborate on the supposed homogeneity and exclusivity of caste society in Marathi-speaking areas, commenting on the specific nature of its Brahman-non-Brahman conflict (where the cultivating Maratha-Kunbi caste cluster made up the core of politicised non-Brahman activists) and the distinctiveness of the Mahars, Maharashtra’s largest Dalit community.29 Shankarrao Deo made a similar point elsewhere: ‘the Mahars are so ubiquitous that it has often been said that their presence is one of the clearest indications of the extent of the territory of the speakers of Marathi’.30 As Chapter 6 reveals in greater detail, these attempts to incorporate low status groups within the Marathi fold were equally evident in those districts with high concentrations of adivasi (‘tribal’) communities. They also reflect similar concerns about the indeterminate religious affiliations of low status groups, raised particularly in the context of a politics of numbers ahead of boundary demarcation in Punjab and Bengal. In particular, the manner in which Deo attempts to connect the categories of Dalit and Marathi here parallels the uneasy relationship between the categories of ‘untouchable’ and ‘Hindu’ in the build-up to partition. In an environment where the Muslim League occasionally employed rhetoric that courted Dalits on the basis of their shared ‘minority’ status, both the Congress and Hindu Mahasabha conversely made a concerted effort to frustrate these claims. Although the CHC ostensibly presented this as an attempt to avoid the fragmentation of the nationalist cause, many Congressmen and Mahasabhaites were also committed to a refusal to divide the Hindu community and destroy its majority. Similarly, attempts to incorporate Dalits within a larger Marathi-speaking community were implicated in debates about linguistic reorganisation, where numbers mattered to the territorialisation of the demand. The SMP’s memorandum also described older ties of harmonious reciprocity between caste groups, which had been undermined by British tactics of ‘divide and rule’. With decolonisation and independence, the compatible social relations of the past could now be revived.31 This stress on a hierarchical yet cohesive caste ‘system’ in the SMP’s memorandum drew upon a long tradition of similar representations of caste within Maharashtra, and India more widely, evident in the writings and speeches of such noted nationalists as Swami Vivekananda, M. G. Ranade, and Gandhi.32 In their writings, caste was represented as a natural ordering of society, a system of mutual benefit where particular groups performed hereditary, ordained functions suited to their natural skills and differences. It was only the arrival of the British that had destroyed the unity evident in the ‘timeless’ and ‘traditional’ villages of rural India.33 By linking the various elements of caste society together within this hierarchical system of mutual benefit, a sense of solidarity might be formed, which would constitute the basis of Indian national unity. These visions of the caste-based nature of Hindu/Maharashtrian society were highly elitist in orientation, and reflected the predominantly high-caste composition of both the Congress and the SMP. By emphasising the importance of a homogeneous regional caste ‘system’ as evidence of Maharashtra’s unity, the SMP perpetuated a hierarchical representation of Marathi-speaking society, in which they claimed the right to speak for those who were less powerful. In this sense, it also reflected the standardisation

Plotting out the province 63 of the Marathi language through high-caste syntax, grammar and idioms in the late nineteenth century.34 The SMP looked to surmount the evidence of tension and conflict amongst Marathi speakers by suggesting this was simply a product of the colonial encounter. But by doing so, the proponents of Samyukta Maharashtra were quick to disregard the significance of low-caste mobilisation on its own terms. This created a number of continuing problems in drawing support for the idea of a united Marathi-speaking province amongst these groups. Minding the minorities in an imagined Maharashtra The supporters of Samyukta Maharashtra made a concerted effort to allay minority fears about linguistic reorganisation. The new Indian constitution, enacted in January 1950, was expected to allay any concerns about the rights and interests of minorities under a democratic system within the proposed unilingual province. Article 15 prohibited discrimination against any citizen on the grounds of religion, race, caste, gender or place of birth, whilst Article 19 contained particular clauses that related to residence and movement. Citizens were guaranteed the ‘the right . . . to move freely throughout the territory of India’, and ‘to reside and settle in any part of the territory of India’.35 Finally, the constitution also provided cultural and educational safeguards to minorities, whether they were classified on the basis of religion, caste, race or language. Article 29 proclaimed that, ‘Any section of the citizens residing in the territory of India or any part thereof having a distinct language, script or culture of its own shall have the right to conserve the same’.36 In its memorandum to the SRC, the SMP frequently referred back to these articles, or made general allusions to ‘the ordinary working of Constitutional democracy’, ‘the constitutional set-up of the country’ and ‘the directives of the Constitution’.37 The Parishad also drew upon precedents of unilingual provinces that already existed within the Indian Union to emphasise their point. Describing the position of non-Marathi-speaking minorities in cities such as Bombay and Nagpur if a primarily Marathi-speaking province was to be created, it was suggested that their situation would be ‘the same as the existing position of non-Hindi speakers in Kanpur or Gwalior, or of non-speakers of Bengali in Calcutta or of non-speakers of Tamil in Madras’.38 If the constitution already provided enough protection for these particular communities, they asked, why would it not be able to perform a comparable role in Maharashtra? Despite these references to constitutional safeguards for minority communities, the SMP were all too aware that their vision of democratic governance could be easily conflated with a form of provincial majoritarianism. In an attempt to conciliate such concerns, they downplayed the idea that the formation of unilingual provinces was tantamount to allotting territory to the majority linguistic group in the province. Instead, it was suggested that the advent of democracy and individual rights at independence provided for equality between each citizen of India, regardless of linguistic affiliation: Linguistic majority basis is the only criterion to be adopted in drawing boundaries. [However] To say that thereby we allot territory to a linguistic group, is to say that democracy functions for the majority and not for all. In the given

64

Plotting out the province constitutional set-up of the country, the moral and material resources of the province, whether formed on a linguistic basis or not, belong not only to those who reside in it, but to all Indian nationals.39

This assertion that provincially based and created resources ultimately belonged to the larger nation was to inform the placatory approach of some Samyukta Maharashtra supporters towards the non-Marathi (primarily Gujarati) business elite of Bombay City. In June 1954, for example, Shankarrao Deo held informal discussions with some of the key representatives of these interests, the Bombaybased businessman and member of the Indian Merchants Chamber (IMC), Purushottamdas Thakurdas, and C. L. Gheewala, a professor of economics at Bombay University. These talks ended in stalemate, impacted by inflammatory statements amongst many other proponents of Samyukta Maharashtra (both within certain sections of the Maharashtrian Congress and amongst the left-leaning opposition) that ‘capitalists would have no place in Maharashtra’, by references to ‘the nationalisation of industries’, and by the dichotomy drawn between Gujarati ‘moneyed classes’ and the ‘downtrodden and disinherited’ Maharashtrians of Bombay City.40 At least in part, then, these comments suggest that the demand for Maharashtra was also based on a sense of exploitation when set against the dominant position of Gujarati speakers in business and commerce within Bombay. Despite the failure of these talks, Deo was not to be deterred from his attempts at accommodation. In November, he was privy to a memo which suggested that, ‘One of the ways of meeting the apprehensions of minority interests in the city of Bombay would be to increase the powers of Bombay City Corporation and to make it more largely autonomous than at present’.41 This plan included handing over additional responsibilities such as education, health and development from the provincial government to the municipal corporation, with a concomitant increase in its financial resources. The leaders of the SMP also made a concerted effort to downplay the concurrent fears of some of their fellow Marathi speakers, who felt equally threatened by the creation of a unilingual province that might be controlled by particular dominant social groups within Maharashtra. Many of the inhabitants of Vidarbha, the Marathi-speaking portions of Madhya Pradesh, were concerned that their rights and interests would be disregarded in a united Maharashtra governed from Bombay City. The Akola Pact of August 1947, signed by prominent politicians in both western Maharashtra and Vidarbha, looked to reassure Vidarbhans that they would retain some autonomy of action, suggesting the creation of a separate Vidarbha sub-province within a united Maharashtra.42 However, as the new Constitution did not permit the formation of sub-provinces, a new agreement had to be fleshed out in the early 1950s. In a letter to the Vidarbha leader P. K. Deshmukh, B. S. Hiray again tried to theorise about the relationship between western Maharashtra and Vidarbha in a unilingual Marathi-speaking province, which paralleled some of the plans suggested for Bombay City. Drawing upon the suggestions presented in an article by K. T. Deshmukh from the Hitavada newspaper (based in Nagpur), Hiray suggested that a fair proportion of divisible income, development funding and state

Plotting out the province 65 service jobs should be allotted to Vidarbha, while the High Court and Revenue Board currently held in Nagpur would remain after amalgamation.43 Many of these recommendations were included in the new Nagpur Pact of September 1953, yet the idea of a separate Vidarbha continued to receive support amongst some groups within that region for the remainder of the decade.44 Finally, the SMP’s memorandum to the SRC recognised the need to provide adequate protection for Dalits and Adivasis within the proposed unilingual province. It described the difficulties such low status groups experienced in obtaining ‘adequate room for settlement, land for cultivation, access to the essentials of life like water, facilities for obtaining education, and suffer from handicaps like the hereditary obligation to serve the Government and the community’.45 Although the memorandum did not outline any practical policies they expected to implement, the assurance to safeguard Dalit and Adivasi interests was expected to allay fears amongst these minority groups, especially those who felt threatened by the spectre of a hegemonic Maratha-Brahman combine dominating a post-reorganisation Marathi-speaking province. Although this strategy had some success – B. R. Ambedkar sporadically supported reorganisation, whilst some members of the Scheduled Castes Federation (SCF) became involved in the SMP – voices of concern continued to emanate from amongst these groups during the reorganisation debates.

Panics over reorganisation Despite reassurances to the contrary from the supporters of Samyukta Maharashtra, many minorities anticipated the instability of their belonging and interests within a Marathi-speaking province when confronted by both the reality of ‘one man one vote’ and the prevailing logic of non-discrimination after partition. Minorities feared that the SMP’s declaration that they would provide for the interests of these groups was a temporary concession, which would be withdrawn once the supporters of a unilingual province had achieved their demands. As a consequence of such concerns, alternative imaginaries of belonging along the lines of caste, language, religion and sub-region emerged, meaning that the construction of a Maharashtrian majority and non-Maharashtrian minority did not achieve hegemony in the popular imagination at this time. Many made reference to democracy as an exercise in political commensuration instead, through which adequate safeguards would be accorded to minority communities within the province. Others worried that the somewhat limited constitutional protections introduced for minorities in 1950 would be undermined if linguistic provinces were given the go-ahead. For those holding such views, the more perspicacious method to protect minority interests was to emphasise their status as citizens of India, privileging national above both regional and communal identities. This tactic coincided with the CHC’s emphasis on national unity in the aftermath of partition, and therefore tended to receive the support of the Congress government at the centre. In fact, the fearful reactions of the CHC and particular minority communities to calls for linguistic reorganisation both paralleled and echoed similar responses to the Pakistan demand.

66

Plotting out the province

Both of these demands were presented as aspects of a wider maelstrom of communalism, separatism and majoritarianism, elements of a potentially toxic mix through which India’s political future was to be theorised and decided. The Congress, partition and reorganisation For Nehru and those Congressmen who shared his vision of Indian society, independence heightened their concerns about the divisive tendencies perceived to be inherent within demands for provincial reorganisation. Equally, outside Nehru’s rather limited sphere of influence, other Congressmen who were drawn to a more religiously conservative political position agonised about reorganisation’s potential to divide a homogenised ‘Hindu nation’. In July 1948, for example, the Minister for Industry and Supply, Syama Prasad Mookerjee (who would go on to form the Bharatiya Jana Sangh in 1951), sent a letter to the Home Minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, in which he commented, It is tragic to find that in various parts of India a wave of provincialism is moving the minds of many people. This has to be immediately put down, for this contains the germs of our destruction. This will be worse than communalism. History will repeat itself and we shall lose our country if we allow disruptive tendencies to become powerful and block the road to national unity.46 Partition ensured that for the next 13 years the increasingly vociferous demands for the creation of a unilingual Maharashtra were rejected as damaging to Indian unity. After 1947, the new Indian Government was tasked with dealing with the fall-out from mass genocide, violence and displacement, the matters of refugee rehabilitation and resettlement, and the definition of both territorial boundaries and citizenship rights and statuses.47 Meanwhile, the new Indian Government had also the small matter of integrating hundreds of semi-autonomous princely states, an anomaly of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British pattern of conquest, into the Union. Indeed, the princely states of Hyderabad, Junagadh and Kashmir had to be assimilated by force of arms.48 The integration of the latter provoked armed conflict with Pakistan, who also claimed Kashmir as part of its territory, culminating in the First Indo-Pakistani War (1947–1948) and an uneasy ceasefire brokered by the United Nations. It is clear that partition was not a contained historical event, but was rather a deeply ambiguous and transitional phenomenon. The scale of the disruption even threatened the collapse of the new postcolonial governments. In these circumstances, Nehru and the Congress moved swiftly to try and consolidate the authority of the new Indian state. Particularly emblematic in this context was the reaction to the assassination of Gandhi. Murdered on 30 January 1948 by Nathuram Godse, a Marathi-speaking Brahman with links to the Hindu Mahasabha, Gandhi’s death allowed the Congress to at least temporarily triumph over its political rivals and challengers on the Hindu right, whilst strengthening Nehru’s authority over the socially and religiously conservative nationalists within his own party. At least on the surface, then, Gandhi’s death ‘guaranteed the ascendancy of

Plotting out the province 67 [Nehruvian] secularism and democracy as the legitimate foundation of the Indian state’.49 In this understanding, secularism was in part about consigning ‘primordial’ identities and politics to the past, so as to ‘progress’ into the future together. Democracy, meanwhile, was commonly conflated with non-discrimination and equality on the basis of the universality of individual rights.50 Communal sentiments, whether constructed on the basis of affinity to religion, caste or language, were perceived to obscure Indians’ ‘true’ national consciousness. Nehru, for example, equated the pitfalls of loyalty to language after independence with problems engendered by loyalty to other forms of ‘primordial’ group-based identities during the colonial period. In a speech after the January 1956 violence in Bombay, for example, Nehru argued: In the olden days, the caste system was responsible for creating a great many barriers and prevented the growth of nationalism. Now, linguism is trying to do the same. You cannot prevent people from moving freely, nor can boundaries be shifted every time there is such a movement. . . . The danger is that if the principle of linguism is adhered to too rigidly in the formation of states, then instead of coming closer, they will grow apart.51 The events in Bombay City, and the animosities and emotions that they provoked, were also linked with wider debates about the implications of partition. Nehru framed both linguistic reorganisation and partition in the context of his dichotomy between a primitive communalism and a progressive secularism. Partition provoked ‘barbarous acts’, and it was only through ‘great difficulty we brought the nation back to an even keel and began to progress slowly’.52 Likewise, the violence in Bombay was evidence of the tendency to ‘slip backward and fall’.53 If we return to Gandhi’s assassination in this context, it was equally significant that Nehru’s speech was delivered exactly eight years since this seminal event, and was made to mark the occasion. Nehru exploited the opportunity this commemoration afforded to raise the spectre of Gandhi as the forefather of a particularly Nehruvian vision of secularism, democracy and development. He also deprecated the tactics and ‘narrow-mindedness’ of Samyukta Maharashtra’s supporters: I agree that there are a large number of Maharashtrians and their demand is legitimate. . . . But what I cannot tolerate is that some people should use this as an excuse to incite people to riot and loot and burn Gandhiji’s picture and effigy. . . . So we observe this day to pay homage to [Gandhi’s] memory. But to what purpose is this if we forget his teachings and are easily led astray in our pride, bitterness, enmity, narrow-mindedness and vulgarity?. . . . There are great tasks ahead and we are trying to lay the foundations of a new India. But there can be real progress only when we get rid of our narrow-minded way and petty quarrels and bitterness.54 In fact, Gandhi’s death had a peculiar synergy with the demand for a unilingual Maharashtra. As a consequence of his assassination, antipathy towards Marathas

68

Plotting out the province

(owing to initial confusion over Godse’s caste identity) and then Marathi-speaking Brahmans emerged.55 The LPC, for example, was to accuse ‘the Poona school of thought’ (a broad catch-all phrase applied to Marathi-speaking Brahmans residing in Poona) of not seeing ‘eye to eye with the rest of India as to the future destiny of this country or with regard to the part which Indian provinces should play in the evolution of the Indian nation’.56 For the LPC, as well as Nehru and others who shared this view, ‘the desire for a Samyukta Maharashtra [was] the natural expression of their ideology, and the real or imaginary apprehensions of Gujarat . . . domination [is] its natural all[y]’.57 This sense of exploitation at the hands of Gujaratis (as mentioned in the previous section) was tied in to the antipathy expressed towards Gandhi during the Bombay riots, and highlighted a tendency to separate communities on the basis of linguistic competition and difference. It also echoed Muslim concerns about Hindu Raj in an independent India, and their desire to claim a Muslim homeland in provinces where they constituted a majority themselves. The repercussions of the Pakistan demand were evident in the concerns of the LPC about the implications of linguistic reorganisation on minority groups. Drawing upon the ongoing impact of partition upon notions of belonging amongst Hindu and Muslim populations in the north, the LPC was apprehensive that ‘the moment a province is allotted a majority linguistic group . . . it begins to regard the area as exclusively belonging to that particular linguistic group, and to treat all persons not belonging to the majority linguistic group as . . . outsiders and aliens’.58 It was in this context that Nehru and his supporters were willing to recognise some forms of linguistic difference, which contradicted their primary emphasis elsewhere on non-discrimination and individual rights. Nehru understood that these identities could not be ignored if linguistic minorities were to feel that they belonged to both India and its provincial units. This strategy also replicated the desire of Nehru and some other senior figures in the Congress to include India’s modal Muslim minority within a wider sense of ‘Indianness’ after partition. The SRC, for example, took up the Nehruvian mantle by recommending a number of positive constitutional duties and legal safeguards at the centre to protect linguistic minorities. These included a guarantee ‘to provide for facilities to the minorities for education in the mothertongue at the primary school stage’, an option for individual candidates to choose to use the Union language or the language of a minority in competitive examinations for recruitment to the provincial services, and a commitment that the governor of the province would supervise the implementation of central government policies related to linguistic minorities.59 Yet, the contradictions between democracy as non-discrimination, on the one hand, and democracy as a form of commensuration, on the other, which bedevilled Nehruvian secularism, were also apparent in the SRC’s often haphazard and half-hearted approach to minority safeguards. The SRC feared that ‘overemphasis’ on the rights of minorities and constitutional safeguards might ‘keep the minority-consciousness alive and might thereby hamper the growth of a common nationhood’.60 This reflected the Nehruvian commitment to eventually overwhelming such ‘primordial’ group-based affinities, but it also meant that the SRC’s recommendations were ultimately bedevilled by contradictions. The report’s authors generally ignored minority concerns that

Plotting out the province 69 constitutional safeguards were already being overridden, and instead hoped ‘good sense will prevail . . . and that it will not be necessary for the minorities to have recourse to legal remedies’.61 This rather vague faith in ‘good sense’ and ‘fairplay’ reflected a recurring tendency, despite their best intentions, for democracy as nondiscrimination to easily slide into democracy as a form of majoritarian rule. In fact, Nehruvian conceptions of secularism and democracy were never institutionalised, and often operated in competition with other, often localised, ideas about their meanings, such as those propagated by the supporters of a unilingual Maharashtra. The SRC implicitly recognised as much in their final paragraph on safeguards for linguistic groups, where they concluded, Governmental activity at State level affects virtually every sphere of a person’s life and a democratic government must reflect the moral and political standards of the people. Therefore, if the dominant group is hostile to the minorities, the lot of minorities is bound to become unenviable. There can be no substitute for a sense of fairplay on the part of the majority and a corresponding obligation on the part of the minorities to fit themselves in as elements vital to the integrated and ordered progress of the State.62 The recommendations proposed by the SRC to protect minority interests in linguistic provinces thereby engaged with a number of competing understandings of democracy and secularism that existed in postcolonial India. This confused position ultimately limited the effectiveness of their recommendations on minority safeguards. In turn, however, each of these visions of democratic conduct also had important implications for nascent conceptions of belonging articulated by minorities towards both postcolonial India and a unilingual Maharashtra. As the rest of this chapter reveals, spokesmen for minorities in the context of linguistic reorganisation expressed their sense of citizenship by engaging with and negotiating these understandings of democracy and secularism at particular moments and opportune conjunctures. They sometimes placed emphasis on the state’s apparent blindness towards communal affiliations, sometimes advocated for the recognition of their minority status and sometimes articulated both of these positions simultaneously. However, both such expressions of democracy as non-discrimination and democracy as commensuration were articulated by minorities in circumstances shaped by the threat posed by those who equated democracy with majority rule. As we have already seen, proponents of Samyukta Maharashtra were prone to articulating a sense of belonging that conflated Maharashtra primarily with Marathi speakers. Gujarati businesses and Bombay City One of the most significant strategies employed by minorities who felt threatened by plans for unilingual provinces was to invoke the goals of national solidarity and democratic equality. This was evident in the approach of the Bombay Citizens’ Committee (BCC) and the Indian Merchants’ Chamber (IMC), who both tended to represent the concerns of non-Marathi (primarily Gujarati) business interests in

70

Plotting out the province

Bombay City. The BCC claimed to ‘have no provincial or sectarian bias in their approach to the problem’.63 Rather, they advocated that India’s citizens privilege ‘the spirit of national consciousness’, which would serve ‘to consolidate the forces of national unity, for economic reconstruction, essential for the maintenance of our hard-won freedom’.64 Meanwhile, the memorandum submitted by the IMC focused on the importance of Bombay City for the fulfilment of national objectives in the context of industrial development. According to the Chamber, No one who has the welfare of the country at heart would desire Bombay should be made to suffer the consequences of inevitable bitterness and conflict tending to detract from its industrial eminence and greatness . . . were it linked up with a unilingual State.65 The noted Bombay-based economist Professor M. L. Dantwala argued that proposals for the retention of a multilingual Bombay Province were constructed on an impartial basis. Rather than making ‘claims on behalf of Gujeratis’, they had also ‘praised the contributions of Parsis, Khojas, Memons and even Marathas’.66 In part, the emphasis placed on nationality, cosmopolitanism and secularism by the Gujarati minority in Bombay City replicated the tactics employed by Muslims in the first decade after partition, who were conscious that the field for a separate Muslim politics had now considerably narrowed. Taylor Sherman has revealed that, in an effort to assert their sense of belonging within India, Muslims now held their own political participation to a higher secular standard. This allowed India’s Muslim politicians to ‘make a principled case’ against the Hindu Mahasabha and other ‘groups that most threatened the security of Muslims in India’.67 Likewise, Gujarati businessmen compared their own idealised ‘democratic’ behaviour to that employed by the ‘Maharashtrian goondas’, in an effort to solidify their interests in Bombay City. In an interview with Indira Gandhi in October 1959, after the Congress had announced its intention to bifurcate Bombay Province and apportion the city to Maharashtra, an IMC deputation ‘appealed to her to see that . . . the faith of people in democracy and democratic decisions was not undermined and let not the impression go round that pressure tactics and threats can triumph over right and just decisions’.68 For the IMC, democracy, here interpreted as a belief in non-discrimination and the equal basis of individual rights, as well as the right kinds of behaviour, was likely to be undermined by the creation of a Marathi-speaking province (including Bombay City). This portrayal of Maharashtrians as deploying undemocratic tactics to achieve their aims also resonated with older depictions of them by the business community during the violence in Bombay City in January 1956. In a resolution passed at a meeting of the managing committee of the Paper Traders Association, the behaviour of Maharashtrians was castigated in the following terms: All those Maharashtrian leaders masquerading behind respectable party labels and inciting their ignorant and lawless fellow-citizens into attacks on lawabiding sections of the city’s population are the real culprits and their acts of

Plotting out the province 71 political Gundaism are equal to acts of TRAITORS OF THIS COUNTRY as the Unity and Solidarity of our Country is attacked at its roots’.69 The business community’s portrayal of the violence, and Maharashtrians more generally, actually fitted neatly with Nehru’s own concerns about the correct avenues for democratic conduct and his emphasis on strengthening the nation at a time of political uncertainty. But the stance taken by the representatives of business interests in Bombay did not necessarily correlate with the views of all the IMC’s members. In a letter to the IMC in September 1954, D. V. Kelkar, the secretary of the Maharashtra Chamber of Commerce, maintained that the IMC should have consulted its member-bodies on their views before passing a resolution deprecating linguistic reorganisation. Kelkar disagreed with the IMC’s suggestion that ‘reorganisation on a linguistic or other basis will weaken the bonds of unity of the country’.70 Like other proponents of Samyukta Maharashtra, he advocated an alternative vision of democracy, which implied that India would not be truly democratic until reorganised on linguistic lines. As such, the rejection of demands for linguistic reorganisation by the IMC reflected the fact ‘that these commercial interests have no faith in democracy and the constitution, or perhaps have other motives of their own’.71 Kelkar insinuated that the BCC and IMC, despite presenting themselves as encompassing public opinion from a cross-section of the city’s population, were primarily controlled by Gujarati-speaking industrial and commercial elites. Statistics on membership of Bombay’s commercial organisations, accumulated in June 1947 in an effort to ‘show that Bombay is an all-India city which is not a natural part of any particular province and must therefore be an independent unit in India’, actually revealed the primarily Gujarati background of these groups.72 The IMC, for example, out of a total of 1,858 members, was made up of 1,602 Gujarati speakers, 74 Marathi speakers, and ten Kannada speakers.73 The Seed Traders’ Association had 252 Gujarati-speaking merchants and brokers, 31 Marwaris, nine Muslims, and only one ‘Deccani’ (probably Marathi-speaking).74 These statistics help reveal the relatively privileged position that Gujarati businessmen held within Bombay City. In fact, their dominance over Bombay’s enterprise put them in a more advantageous position when compared to the precarious situation experienced by India’s Muslims after independence. Rather than seeing their opportunities curtailed, these groups were able to foreground their commercial acumen and economic significance in a postcolonial India that was heavily focused on developmental schemes. This was evident in the justifications behind the recommendations made by both the LPC and JVP Committee to reconstitute Bombay City as a separate city-state, and in the SRC’s plans to retain Bombay City within a composite Bombay Province.75 Despite their ostensible commitment to national interests and Nehruvian objectives, it could also serve the interests of Gujarati speakers residing in Bombay City to present their arguments against reorganisation through the idiom of the extra guarantees and privileges the state was expected to provide for minorities. In this understanding, universal forms of individual citizenship in a democratic system were not felt to be protection enough from an anticipated majoritarianism amongst

72

Plotting out the province

reconstituted provincial governments. The Bombay Pradesh Congress Committee (BPCC), for example, argued that, In a purely linguistic state there is bound to be preference or partiality in the services and other things for those who speak the language of that state and discrimination against others. Naturally this would not be tolerated by linguistic minorities.76 The Gujarati scholar C. L. Gheewala made a similar point in his pamphlet on the future of Bombay City. Quoting from C. A. McCartney’s 1934 treatise on National States and National Minorities, he suggested, The lot of a national minority is indeed a hard one . . . He is by definition a stranger to all those special hopes and ambitions, which went into the making of the community, in which his whole public life must be conducted.77 By holding both the national and provincial governments to account through the aforementioned constitutional protections provided for minorities, Gujarati speakers hoped to overcome the potential threat of majority rule in Maharashtra. Ambedkar and the territorialisation of number Contending with the implications of reorganisation in Bombay was not the sole preserve of Gujarati speakers, however, and was also a matter of concern for other communities who might come to occupy a similar position in a reconstituted province. The renowned Maharashtrian Dalit politician and thinker, B. R. Ambedkar, for example, experienced a number of difficulties in deciding whether to support, contest or find a more nuanced position through which to locate Dalit political agency ahead of the creation of Maharashtra and other linguistic provinces. In significant ways, his thinking reflected his wider experience of articulating a Dalit view on representative and responsible government, as well as his ideas about ‘nationhood’ and the Pakistan demand. Ambedkar’s second edition of his seminal tome, Pakistan, or the Partition of India (1946), and his initial reflections on linguistic reorganisation, Maharashtra as a Linguistic Province (1948), were penned within the space of two years, and shared many recurring themes and opinions about India’s political future. The perceived threat posed to minorities as a consequence of affective attachment to a particular space was a frequent refrain during the transition to independence in South Asia, in which Pakistan figured as one representation of a much wider demand for provincial autonomy. Ambedkar’s suspicions about nationality and the territorialisation of number were apparent in his reactions to both Pakistan and Samyukta Maharashtra. Yet, he also remained a somewhat reluctant supporter of each demand throughout this period. In Maharashtra as a Linguistic Province, Ambedkar referred to linguistic provinces as a harbinger of democratic governance, in a similar manner to D. R. Gadgil and other proponents of Samyukta Maharashtra.78 He argued that the

Plotting out the province 73 functioning of democracy relied upon a degree of social homogeneity within the provincial units, which would only be achieved by the redrawing of boundaries on linguistic lines. Ambedkar’s understanding of democracy was thus intimately linked to territory and demographics, which in turn, he contended, helped to foster a sense of ‘nationality’ within the provincial units. In the context of the recent events of independence and partition, Ambedkar was careful to distinguish here between nationality ‘in the social sense of the term’ and nationality ‘in its legal and political sense’. Linguistic provinces, he argued, ‘cannot have that attribute of sovereignty which independent nations have’.79 Yet, he generally accepted the idea that ‘the Provinces have all the elements of a distinct nationality and they should be allowed the freedom to grow to their fullest in nationhood’.80 Ambedkar also championed the demand for the inclusion of Bombay City within Maharashtra by invoking the commonalities amongst the Marathi-speaking working classes. Such shared interests, he argued, not only connected them across caste divides, but simultaneously in opposition to the ‘vested interests’ of Gujaratispeaking industrialists.81 These recurring references in Maharashtra as a Linguistic Province recalled the politics of Ambedkar’s Independent Labour Party (ILP) during the 1930s (considered in the previous chapter), which focused on the unity of workers and peasants, of Dalits and non-Brahmans, and of the various opposition parties in Bombay, railed against capitalism and landlordism, Brahmans and Gujarati Banias, and the Congress.82 Both Ambedkar’s recognition that Marathi speakers represented the principle of nationality, and his attempts to invoke a common and progressive Maharashtrian identity in opposition to the ‘vested interests’ of Gujarati traders and industrialists, reproduced and paralleled elements of his near-contemporary approach to the ‘Muslim Question’ in India. As the previous chapter highlighted, Ambedkar and others had made a tentative effort during the interwar period to develop what Faisal Devji has called ‘Minority Pact’ politics, which ultimately unravelled as a consequence of mutual distrust and Muslim ‘fear of falling’.83 During the 1940s, Ambedkar looked back with regret at the failure and fragmentation of this grand coalition of minority interests. Yet, he also accepted that Muslims, as a demographic majority in the northeast and northwest of the subcontinent, represented the principle of nationality.84 In Pakistan, or the Partition of India, for example, he looked to carefully counter the evidence that the Congress and others held up to contend that India’s Muslims and Hindus constituted one nation, arguing that ‘the things that divide are far more vital than the things which unite’.85 However, Ambedkar’s support for Pakistan was always ambivalent and contradictory. It was based less on firm ideological convictions and more on the practical opportunities for Dalits that partition hypothetically provided.86 In a scathing comment, worth quoting at length, Ambedkar suggested the Pakistan demand had actually undermined the League’s support for those Muslims cast adrift in Muslim-minority provinces: What good is Pakistan then? Only to prevent Hindu Raj in Provinces in which the Muslims are in a majority and in which there could never be Hindu Raj! . . .

74

Plotting out the province It is worse than useless to Muslims where they are in a minority, because Pakistan or no Pakistan they will have to face a Hindu Raj. Can politics be more futile than the politics of the Muslim League? The Muslim League started to help minority Muslims and has ended by espousing the cause of majority Muslims. What a perversion in the original aim of the Muslim League! What a fall from the sublime to the ridiculous!87

Despite the ostensible transition from Muslims as minority to Muslims as nation, Ambedkar recognised that Jinnah had continued to acknowledge the politics of territory, numbers and community by premising the Pakistan demand on the majority status of Muslims in large parts of the subcontinent. The shift to espousing the cause of the Muslim majority in these provinces also pitted them against other communities, and potentially threatened the protection of minority interests in an imagined Pakistan. And it is here that we can trace similarities with Ambedkar’s concerns about the plight of minorities in a Marathi-speaking province that would be dominated by the Maratha community. In Maharashtra as a Linguistic Province, Ambedkar had railed against the introduction of separate safeguards for Gujarati speakers, on the basis that ‘citizenship will be common throughout India. There is no provincial citizenship. A Gujarathi in Maharashtra will have the same rights of citizenship in Maharashtra as a Maharashtrian will have’.88 But he had qualified his support for linguistic provinces by maintaining that the constitution ‘should provide that the official language of every Province shall be the official language of the Central Government’, in an effort to guard ‘against the breakup of India’s unity’.89 In this context, Ambedkar offered his support to an understanding of democracy as non-discrimination and individual rights, which tallied with both ostensible Congress policy and his own shift away from the politics of commensuration after independence. By 1955, however, Ambedkar had become increasingly wary of the potential threat of non-Brahman majoritarianism within Maharashtra.90 As outlined in the previous chapter, increased Maratha assertion since the 1930s, as well as their particularly virulent opposition to Dalit temple entry and their use of public spaces, had strengthened this concern. Shortly after the SRC Report was published, Ambedkar penned his own Thoughts on Linguistic States. Within it, he reiterated his commitment to ‘a separate Maharashtra, separate from Gujarathis [sic] and separate from Hindi speaking people’.91 Whilst supporting the idea of one language for each province, however, he now advocated that Maharashtra should be grouped into four separate administrative arenas: Bombay City (which he renamed ‘Maharashtra city state’); ‘Western Maharashtra’; ‘Central Maharashtra’; and ‘Eastern Maharashtra’.92 In part, this was a tactic employed to counter the demographically negligible position of Dalits within Maharashtra: ‘As the area of the State increases the proportion of the minority to the majority decreases . . . and the opportunities for the majority to practice tyranny over the minority becomes greater. The States must therefore be small’.93 But this division was also premised around Ambedkar’s idea that Bombay would

Plotting out the province 75 serve as a sanctuary for Dalits, because no community formed an outright majority in the city (Maharashtrians constituted around 48 per cent of the city’s population): The minorities and the Scheduled Castes who are living in the village are constantly subjected to tyranny, oppression, and even murders by the members of the majority communities. The minorities need an asylum, a place of refuge where they can be free from the tyranny of the majority. If there was a United Maharashtra with Bombay included in it where can they go for safety?94 Ambedkar’s proposal drew upon both an idealised image of the emancipatory potential of migration to the metropolis, and his oft-quoted critique of the village as ‘a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism’. Both of these ideas had been central to the wider Dalit imagination since the late nineteenth century.95 But Ambedkar’s suggestions also reflected an impasse that Anupama Rao has identified within Dalit politics in the context of partition a decade earlier, ‘in which Dalits found themselves as a territorially dispersed minority with nowhere else to go; the impossibility, precisely, of converting minority into nationality at the critical moment of postcolonial transition’.96 Like his calls for a separate Maharashtra city-state ahead of an impending linguistic reorganisation, Ambedkar and the Scheduled Caste Federation had argued for the creation of separate Dalit settlements, where they might constitute a majority, in the immediate build-up to partition. This demand for the creation of a Dalit-only area (which was described as ‘Dalitsthan’, in homage to the idea of Pakistan) thus foregrounded the territorialisation of number as critical to the recognition of Dalits as a separate element or ‘nation’ within India. But it was precisely the fact that India’s Dalits did not constitute a demographic majority in any one particular area within the subcontinent, unlike India’s Muslims and (non-Brahman) Marathi speakers, which ensured this plan failed to develop into a concrete reality. At the same time, Ambedkar’s turn to physical separation points to the difficulties that the Dalit minority experienced within a system of representative politics dominated by the Hindu majority. Ambedkar ultimately realised that majority rule could not be easily tackled through democracy as a form of commensuration, as it continued to mark Dalits as a (later, Buddhist) minority in an antagonistic relationship to a dominant caste Hindu order.97 This was especially the case when the potentialities and opportunities tentatively provided by ‘Minority Pact politics’ with Muslims at the all-India level, and through an alignment of interests with non-Brahmans in Bombay, both fell apart during the 1940s. Both Muslims and Marathas chose to abandon this kind of politics in favour of emphasising their separate status as ‘nations’. Unlike the Dalits, they were able to surmount this impasse through the physical separation afforded by territorial partition, which raised (at least part of ) their community to the status of a demographic majority.

76

Plotting out the province

Minority and majority in Vidarbha The creation of a number of smaller provinces within a unilingual area was also perceived as a solution to the fears of some Marathi speakers residing in the subregions of Marathwada (in Hyderabad) and Vidarbha (in Madhya Pradesh), that they would be dominated after reorganisation by the sub-region of western Maharashtra. In fact, the SRC had been prepared to create a separate province of Vidarbha in 1955, suggesting that ‘There seems to be some prima facie justification for the suspicion that if Vidarbha joins Maharashtra, it cannot be certain that its resources will be spent within its own area on suitable development schemes and projects’.98 The plan was only scrapped with the decision to incorporate Vidarbha into a bigger bilingual Bombay Province in the summer of 1956, in an attempt to placate western Maharashtrian concerns after a unilingual Marathispeaking province was not given the go-ahead. As noted earlier, the supporters of Samyukta Maharashtra had looked to allay Vidarbhan fears by promising to devolve elements of governmental power to Vidarbha under the Nagpur Pact. However, over the next four years of the bilingual experiment, the supporters of Vidarbha suggested that being grouped with the Marathi-speaking portions of Bombay had undermined their rights and interests. It was for this reason that, in contrast to most of the other Marathi-speaking constituencies in Bombay, Vidarbha returned a majority of Congress candidates in the 1957 provincial elections.99 Similarly, this concern influenced the reactions of the supporters of Vidarbha to the decision to bifurcate Bombay into the unilingual provinces of Gujarat and Maharashtra in May 1960. In an article provocatively titled ‘Either Vidarbha, Or No Life!’, published in the Nagpur Chronicle, the author proclaimed that proponents of Samyukta Maharashtra had only achieved their goal ‘because their heads were in large numbers, whether of literate or illiterate, wise or fools. Above all, heads are counted in democracy’. In this understanding, linguistic reorganisation was conflated with an understanding of democracy as (western Maharashtrian) majority rule, which threatened the interests of the minorities. But the author equally concluded that this majoritarianism was not limited to language, but also had a religious dimension. Maharashtrians were ‘communalists’, ‘who did not spare Mahatma Gandhi from killing’ and ‘would not have spared Nehru also from killing’ if he had not submitted to their demands for reorganisation. This, the author suggested, did not chime with the views of most Vidarbhaites, who adhered to a stance on democracy more akin to that advocated by Nehru, based around ‘cosmopolitan living and cosmopolitan administration’ through ‘equal rights’. It was therefore necessary for all citizens of Vidarbha . . . to unite in favour of Vidarbha State and fight courageously to achieve success. Particularly Muslims, Christians and [Dalit] Buddhists should rise to the occasion because if they fail or hesitate to cooperate this time, their future is doomed forever. By appealing to the united interests of a range of minorities the author invoked an idiom akin to the Minority Pact politics of the interwar period to suggest a way out

Plotting out the province 77 of this ‘linguistic and communal State’. Drawing upon the politics of numbers in an era of democratic governance, he claimed that ‘Every minority taken together becomes a majority if it is to be counted arithmetically’.100 In this view, a separate Vidarbha formed through solidarity amongst minorities would demonstrate the fragility of the Maharashtrian majority in a democratic system, and serve as a bastion to protect an array of minority interests.

Conclusion A variety of ideas about India’s nascent democracy were given form in debates over the demands for linguistic reorganisation. For Nehru and others who shared his particular vision of postcolonial India at the centre, the workings of democracy were also intricately tied up with a specific understanding of secularism and secular behaviour. In their understanding, democracy was equated with non-discrimination on the basis of religion, caste and language, and a preference for universal individual rights. Accordingly, they argued that the creation of Maharashtra threatened to impinge upon this ideal, not only because it privileged the politics of language, but also because it threatened the unity of the larger Indian nation-state at a moment of great uncertainty and flux in the immediate aftermath of independence. At times, minority groups in Bombay also plugged into this notion of democracy to deprecate the activities and ideals of Samyukta Maharashtra’s supporters. However, many Congressmen and minorities were equally active in referring to and seeking further constitutional guarantees and safeguards from the state to protect minority interests in a future Marathi-speaking unit. This drew upon an understanding of democracy as a form of commensuration, capable of taking into account varying manifestations of difference and of effectively ameliorating such discrepancies, so that all individuals were able to experience full equality. Other representatives of minority interests looked to develop a kind of ‘Minority Pact’ politics, in an effort to counter the threat of various forms of political majoritarianism in the new province. For many of its supporters, however, the creation of Maharashtra was primarily premised on such an understanding of democracy as majority rule. They maintained that linguistic reorganisation would not in any way jeopardise the integrity of the larger Indian Union, but was a natural corollary to a sense of distinctiveness from and embattlement against other linguistic groups within a larger, national space. This majoritarian conception of democracy was hence premised on exclusivist ideas about linguistic belonging, in which language was considered as something inherent rather than attainable, and whereby each person could have but one language. As a consequence, many individuals who spoke other languages as their ‘mother tongue’, but who otherwise regularly conversed in Marathi during their everyday lives, were simply excluded from such narrow notions of the Maharashtrian community. Equally, according to this logic, it was only through the creation of a separate territorial unit, where an essentialised and supposedly homogeneous community of Marathi speakers would constitute the majority of the population, that they would be protected from the economic and political disadvantages patent in a composite province. The supporters of Samyukta Maharashtra thus relied upon

78

Plotting out the province

both a harmonious portrayal of a united Marathi-speaking community, and the territorialisation of number in Bombay, to achieve their demands. In this sense, the calls for Samyukta Maharashtra both paralleled and replicated aspects of the Pakistan demand. Throughout the 1940s, Jinnah and the Muslim League likewise looked to cultivate a sense of a united Muslim community by papering over myriad distinctions amongst Muslims on the basis of caste, class, sect and region. Equally, the combined significance of number and territory was central to the ultimate efficacy of the Pakistan demand. In Jinnah’s vision, the Muslim-majority provinces of the northeast and northwest would serve as sites where the rights and interests of Muslims could be prioritised, whilst simultaneously operating as counterweights to the negligible position of Muslim minorities elsewhere within the subcontinent. In fact, Ambedkar recognised the significance of territory and number to both demands, and the potential threat both posed to the position of minorities within their bounds. Such concerns were clear in his own attempts to have the Dalit community recognised as a distinct entity (or ‘nationality’) through migration and territorial separation, plans which were first raised in the context of an impending partition and then again ahead of linguistic reorganisation a decade or so later. Ultimately, these insights suggest that rather than always treating partition and the Pakistan demand as an exceptional event, it might be better situated as one manifestation of a wider blossoming of different ideas about provincial autonomy at the moment of postcolonial transition, albeit the largest and with the most palpable repercussions.

Notes 1 Yashawant D. Phadke, Politics and Language, Bombay: Himalaya Publishing House, 1979; Robert W. Stern, The Process of Opposition in India, London: University of Chicago Press, 1970; Robert W. Stern, ‘Maharashtrian Linguistic Provincialism and Indian Nationalism’, Pacific Affairs, 37 (1964), 37–49; Shreeyash Palshikar, ‘Breaking Bombay, Making Maharashtra: Media, Identity Politics and State Formation in Modern India’, Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007, Chapter 2. 2 Cf. Joya Chatterji, ‘Partition Studies: Prospects and Pitfalls’, The Journal of Asian Studies [henceforth JAS], 73.2 (2014), 309–312 (p. 312). 3 Lisa Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009, Introduction; Taylor Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India: Negotiating Citizenship in Postcolonial Hyderabad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, Chapter 6. 4 Cf. Véronique Bénéï, Schooling Passions: Nation, History, and Language in Contemporary Western India, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008, p. 166. 5 Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009, pp. 68–69. 6 For more on this point, see Chapter 6; see also Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India, Chapter 6; Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India, Introduction. 7 Including Jinah, who tended to conceive of Pakistan as an abstract idea, rather than a given territory. See Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013, p. 24; The Maharashtrian Dalit politician Bhimrao R. Ambedkar was a notable exception. See Bhimrao R. Ambedkar, Pakistan, or the Partition of India, Bombay: Thackers Publishers, 1946, Chapter XIV: The Problems of Pakistan.

Plotting out the province 79 8 New Delhi, National Archives of India [henceforth NAI], Government of India [henceforth GOI], Reforms Office File 22/5/46-R, ‘Sreejut B.S. Hiray’, n.d. My emphasis. 9 New Delhi, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library [henceforth NMML], All India Congress Committee Papers [henceforth AICC], Part I, File 37 (1946): B. Pattabhi Sitaramayya, ‘Presidential Address’, at Convention on Linguistic and Cultural Provinces in India, Delhi, 8th December 1946, New Delhi: Delhi Printing Works, n.d. 10 Dhananjay R. Gadgil, The Federal Problem in India, Poona: Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, 1947, p. 66. 11 Dhananjay R. Gadgil, Federating India, Poona: Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, 1945, p. 14. 12 Ibid. 13 Gadgil’s pamphlet was written between June 1946 and February 1947, but only published sometime after 24 June 1947, 21 days after the announcement of the 3 June Plan. See Gadgil, The Federal Problem in India, pp. v–vi (Preface). 14 Ibid., p. 67. My emphasis. 15 Gadgil, Federating India, p. 13. 16 Ibid. 17 Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India, pp. 21–22. 18 Gadgil, Federating India, p. 8. 19 Bénéï, Schooling Passions, p. 166. 20 ‘Raghoba’s Letter from Lahore’, quoted in Christopher A. Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 43–44; see also Sumit Guha, ‘Transitions and Translations: Regional Power and Vernacular Identity in the Dakhan, 1500– 1800’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 24.2 (2004), 23–31 (p. 29). 21 Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 22 David Gilmartin, ‘Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative’, JAS, 57.4 (1998), 1068–1095 (p. 1071). 23 Bhimrao R. Ambedkar, A Report on the Constitution of the Government of Bombay Presidency, Presented to the Indian Statutory Commission. Quoted in Rao, The Caste Question, p. 135. 24 Gadgil, The Federal Problem in India, p. 67. 25 For a similar point about the non-Brahman movement’s demographic majority in Madras and their demand for ‘Dravidasthan’, see Devji, Muslim Zion, p. 184. 26 Gadgil, The Federal Problem in India, pp. 186–187. My emphasis. 27 David Gilmartin, ‘The Historiography of India’s Partition: Between Civilization and Modernity’, JAS, 74.1 (2015), 23–41 (p. 32). 28 Samyukta Maharashtra Parishad [henceforth SMP], Reorganisation of States in India with Particular Reference to the Formation of Maharashtra, Bombay: Topiwalla Mansion, 1954, p. 6. 29 Ibid., pp. 6–7. 30 NMML, Shankarrao Deo Papers, File 83 (1952–1953), Untitled Note, n.d., p. 129. 31 SMP, Reorganisation of States in India, pp. 7–8. 32 Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 163–166, 175–179, 251–253; Sumit Sarkar, Writing Social History, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 326–328, 346–347. 33 For a critique of this representation of pre-colonial India, see Sumit Guha, ‘Civilisations, Markets and Services: Village Servants in India from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries’, Indian Economic and Social History Review [henceforth IESHR], 41 (2004), 79–101 (pp. 86–87).

80

Plotting out the province

34 See Chapter 2 for greater detail, as well as Veena Naregal, Language Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere: Western India under Colonialism, London: Anthem, 2001; Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India, p. 24. 35 Government of India, ‘Article 19’, The Constitution of India (New Delhi: Ministry of Law and Justice, Government of India, 2015, p. 9, available at http://lawmin.nic.in/ olwing/coi/coi-english/coi-4March2016.pdf [last accessed 28 November 2017]. 36 ‘Article 29’, ibid., p. 13. 37 SMP, Reorganisation of States in India, pp. 1, 2, 6–8, 15, 80. 38 Ibid., p. 5. 39 Ibid., p. 15. 40 NMML, N.V. Gadgil Papers, File 4 (1955–1957), ‘Letter from D.K. Bankale to N.V. Gadgil’, 16 July 1956; ‘Letter from Lalit Mohan Gupta to N.V. Gadgil’, 22 June 1956; ‘Letter from N.V. Gadgil to Lalit Mohan Gupta’, 14 June 1956; ‘Letter from Govindlal Shivlal Motilal to N.V. Gadgil’, 16 January 1956. 41 NMML, Shankarrao Deo Papers, File 84 (1954), ‘To Shri Shankarrao Deo, for Private Circulation, “Powers of the Municipal Corporation of the City of Bombay and Governance of the Metropolitan Area”’, 16 November 1954. 42 ‘Appendix IV: The Akola Pact’, Report of the LPC 1948, New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1948, p. 41. 43 NMML, Shankarrao Deo Papers, File 83 (1952–1953), ‘Letter from B.S. Hiray to P.K. Deshmukh’, 4 August 1953. 44 Indeed, the demand for a separate province of Vidarbha is still being voiced today. See Louise Tillin, Remapping India: New States and Their Political Origins, London: Hurst and Company, 2013, pp. 177–178. 45 SMP, Reorganisation of States in India, p. 8. 46 ‘From S.P. Mookerjee’, 17 July 1948, in Sardar Patel’s Correspondence, 1945–1950, Volume VI, ed. by Durga Das, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1973, pp. 320–323. 47 Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in Indian’s Partition, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998; Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007; Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan, London: Yale University Press, 2007; Ian Talbot, ‘Punjabi Refugees’ Rehabilitation and the Indian State: Discourses, Denials and Dissonances’, Modern Asian Studies [henceforth MAS], 45 (2011), 109–130. 48 Vappala P. Menon, Integration of the Indian States, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1997 [1956]; Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, Oxford: Macmillan, 2007, Chapter 3; Taylor C. Sherman, ‘Migration, Citizenship and Belonging in Hyderabad (Deccan), 1946–1956’, MAS, 45 (2011), 81–107. 49 Yasmin Khan, ‘Performing Peace: Gandhi’s Assassination as a Critical Moment in the Consolidation of the Nehruvian State’, MAS, 45 (2011), 57–80 (p. 60). 50 Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India, p. 14. 51 Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘Peaceful March for Progress’, 30 January 1956, in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru [henceforth SWJN], Volume XXXI, ed. by Holenarasipur Y. Sharada Prasad and A. K. Damodaran, New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 2002, pp. 48–49. 52 Ibid., p. 46. 53 Ibid., p. 51. 54 Ibid. 55 Initially it was thought to be a Maratha who had assassinated Gandhi, provoking a petition from the Kshatriya Maratha Association to the AICC protesting their community’s innocence. See NMML, AICC Papers, Part I. File G-17 (1946–1949), ‘Letter

Plotting out the province 81

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

from Y.R. Tawde, President, Kshatriya Maratha Association, Maratha Colony (West), Dahiwar, Borivil, Bombay Suburban District, to the President, AlCC, “Re: Marathas and the New Constitution”’, 2 March 1948. Report of the LPC, pp. 10–11. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 25. States Reorganization Commission [henceforth SRC], Report of the SRC, 1955, New Delhi: The Manager, Government of India Press, 1955, pp. 205–216. Ibid., p. 207. Ibid., p. 208. Ibid., p. 216. Bombay Citizens’ Committee [henceforth BCC], Memorandum Submitted to the States Reorganisation Commission by BCC, Bombay: n.p., 1954, pp. iv–v (Preface). Ibid. Indian Merchants Chamber [henceforth IMC], Bombay, Memorandum Submitted by the Committee of the Chamber to the SRC, Bombay: India Printing Works, 1954, pp. 12–13. Mohanlal L. Dantwala, C. L. Gheewala, and C. N. Vakil, Future of Bombay: A Rejoinder to B.R. Ambedkar, Bombay: Bombay Chronicle, 1948, p. 8. Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India, Chapter 5. NMML, IMC Papers, File 1452 (1959), ‘Press Note: An Interview of the IMC with Shrimati Indira Gandhi, President, Indian National Congress’, 1 October 1959. Ibid., File 1476 (1955), ‘Resolution Passed at the Meeting of the Managing Committee of the Paper Traders Association’, 25 January 1956. Ibid., File 1173 (1954), ‘Letter from D.V. Kelkar, Secretary, Maharashtra Chamber of Commerce, to IMC, “Resolution No. 6 of the Committee Meeting of the Federation Held on 5 August 1954’, 13 September 1954. Ibid. NMML, Purushottamdas Thakurdas Papers, File 383, Part I (1947–1956), ‘Strictly Confidential Letter of Purushotamdas Thakurdas to Ratilal M. Gandhi, President, IMC, et al’, 29 June 1947. There were 172 speakers of ‘other’ languages. See ibid., ‘The IMC, Bombay, Particulars Re: Membership as on 30 June 1947: Classified According to Regional Denomination’, n.d. Ibid., ‘Strictly Confidential Note on Communal Composition of the Seed Traders’ Association Ltd’, n.d. For a detailed explanation of these decisions, see SRC, Report of the SRC, pp. 114–118. Bombay Pradesh Congress Committee [henceforth BPCC], Hands off Bombay: A Plea for Unity and “First Things First”, Bombay: BPCC, 1954, pp. 27–28. Dantwala, Gheewala, and Vakil, Future of Bombay City, p. 14. Bhimrao R. Ambedkar, Maharashtra as a Linguistic Province: Statement Submitted to the LPC, Bombay: Thacker and Company Limited, 1948, p. 3. Ibid., p. 23. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., pp. 18–20. Gail Omvedt, Dalit Visions: Tracts for the Times/8, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1995, pp. 44–47. Devji, Muslim Zion, pp. 170–171. Rao, The Caste Question, p. 135. Ambedkar, Pakistan, or the Partition of India, p. 13. Devji, Muslim Zion, pp. 194–195. Ambedkar, Pakistan, or the Partition of India, p. 362.

82

Plotting out the province

88 Ambedkar, Maharashtra as a Linguistic Province, p. 36. 89 Ibid., p. 4. 90 NMML, U.N. Dhebar Papers, File 4, Part VII, ‘Forwarded with the Compliments of the P.M.: Copy of Telegram from Dr. B.R. Ambedkar to the P.M.’, 20 November 1955. 91 Bhimrao R. Ambedkar, Thoughts on Linguistic States, New Delhi: Anand Sahitya Sadan, 1955, p. 27. 92 Ibid., p. 21. 93 Ibid., p. 30; see also, pp. 34–35. 94 Ibid., p. 25. 95 See Rao, The Caste Question, pp. 68–69. 96 Ibid., p. 159. 97 Ibid., p. 157. 98 SRC, Report of the SRC, pp. 123–124. 99 ‘Congress Reverse in Bombay State: Bilingualism Not the Only Cause’, The Hindustan Times (Delhi), 18 March 1957. 100 ‘Either Vidarbha, Or No Life!’, Nagpur Chronicle (Nagpur), 2 May 1960. In Mumbai, Maharashtra State Archives [henceforth MSA], Government of Bombay [henceforth GOB], Home Department Triliteral File BAP-1260, 1409 (1960).

4

Selecting Congress candidates in a democratising Bombay

Over the course of the winter of 1951–1952, India held its first general elections since independence from the British Raj. The introduction of universal adult suffrage and the creation of an electorate of 176 million Indians would see candidates elected to both the all-India Lok Sabha (India’s national legislative assembly) and to the various provincial legislatures in the regions. The Indian National Congress, as the premier political organisation in the country, and credited as the major force behind the achievement of independence, was expected to win comfortably. The results supported the predictions. In the Lok Sabha, the first-past-the-post system saw Congress secure 45 per cent of the total votes polled, and gain a huge majority of 364 out of 489 seats. In the provincial assemblies, 42.4 per cent of the vote for the Congress won them 68.6 per cent of the seats, or 2,247 out of the 3,280 available.1 Yet, despite the standing and prestige of the party, which led to their eventual success, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister and the President and leader of the Congress, remained apprehensive in the build-up to the elections about the quality of the party’s nominees. In a letter to Morarji Desai, the Chief Minister of Bombay, Nehru remarked, I find it difficult to become enthusiastic about large numbers of people whom we are likely to set up as our candidates. Many of them are third-rate from any point of view – Congress, education, intellect, service of any cause or any other record. Then their behaviour in many cases has been little short of scandalous. . . . The whole thing turns round caste divisions. . . . I have felt recently as if I was in a den of wild animals. This is the background of our candidates. We can hardly talk of any high principle.2 Nehru’s letter to Desai begins to hint at a divergence, between the ideals of Nehruvian thinking at the centre, which believed in the eradication of ‘primordial’ identities through the consolidation of a plural all-Indian consciousness; and the local imperatives of electoral politics based around caste and community. This chapter examines the selection of Congress candidates for the 1951–1952 elections in Bombay, and places this process within a longer history of the gradual transition to democracy in India. In doing so, it reveals how politicians, Congress members and the wider Indian public saw the nomination of Congress candidates

84

Selecting Congress candidates

as an opportunity to construct, engage with and apply different ideas about suitable democratic conduct and forms of representative government to India’s nascent democracy. In nearly all of these different imaginings, community continued to be central to conceptions of the democratic process. Despite rhetorical attempts to distance the party from communalism, for example, the supposed democratic ideal of individual rights was complicated by Nehru’s attempts to accommodate minority communities in the candidate selection process. Beyond Nehru and his supporters at the centre, meanwhile, others within the Congress reimagined democracy as a form of majoritarianism, in which candidates would be selected on account of their ability to represent the majority caste, linguistic or religious community. By engaging with these varying conceptions of democracy in the context of an expanding franchise and electoral politics, this chapter also has something significant to say about secularism and belonging in South Asia. Secularism, it suggests, was not simply the preserve of a distant central government elite in New Delhi, but was reshaped by local Congressmen and the public as they articulated different conceptions of what it meant to govern in a democratic manner. In consequence, we find that secularism had quite specific contextual meanings, and was as frequently conflated with majoritarianism as it was with non-discrimination and minority rights. For minority communities, their lack of political representation amongst the candidates selected by the provincial Congress was one aspect of a broader unease about their place in a united Maharashtra in the context of an impending linguistic reorganisation. Conversely, for many of those tasked with selecting Congress candidates at the provincial level, the local Marathi/Maratha majority deserved greater democratic representation because they naturally belonged to what was defined as an exclusively Marathi-speaking space.

Democracy, secularism and community For those writing on the transition to democratic governance in India during the immediate post-independence period, the primary focus has been on the Constituent Assembly debates, the democratic institutions that were established by the new constitution, and the writings of leading nationalist figures, particularly Nehru.3 This emphasis has led many scholars to regard the initial postcolonial transition as a period of relative stability and optimism, to be compared favourably to the later difficulties and uncertainties that have characterised the functioning of democracy since Indira Gandhi’s premiership in the late 1960s and 1970s.4 In these accounts, the earliest elections in a democratic, postcolonial India have received relatively short shrift. It is only in recent years that historians have gained access to archival material that provides some sense of how democracy functioned in these early elections.5 Yet, as Taylor Sherman has noted, ‘they have tended to celebrate the feat that India pulled off by introducing universal adult franchise and holding the first elections within five years of independence’, thereby equally focusing their attentions ‘on [state] institutions, especially the Election Commission’.6 Conversely, those that have considered the everyday workings of democracy during elections have tended to be anthropologists and political scientists, who have

Selecting Congress candidates 85 generally focused on the significance of patronage, social pressures and other supposedly ‘perverse and backward political practice[s]’.7 For many, these practices and pressures are critiqued for constraining an individual’s choice when voting and are demonstrative of the apparent ailments of India’s democracy.8 Between these ideals and institutions, on the one hand, and the decisions and pressures placed on each individual voter, on the other, is a range of democratic pursuits that are worthy of further exploration. By focusing on the selection of Congress candidates in Bombay ahead of provincial elections instead, this chapter offers a more all-encompassing perspective on the gradual transition to democracy in western India.9 Although full adult suffrage was not introduced until the promulgation of the constitution in 1950, this notion of a measured democratic transition developed as a consequence of the limited devolution of political power to Indians in the interwar period. For the Congress Party in Bombay, the chance to form provincial governments after the elections of 1937 and 1946 provided senior party members with the opportunity to experience government, and to deploy the administrative apparatus of the state to further Congress interests. In tandem with the shifting nature of bureaucratic power in Bombay (discussed in Chapter 5), these processes challenge the perceived binary in much scholarship between the governments of Nehru and his daughter, by highlighting the manner in which the state had been both indigenised and politicised by the early postcolonial period. The selection of Congress candidates also proved an opportunity for politicians, Congress members, and the public to explore the ideals and boundaries of democratic conduct. The various petitions and memorandums about the behaviour and values of proposed candidates, which were received by both the all-India Congress High Command and the various Provincial Congress Committees within Bombay ahead of the provincial elections, point to the varying and often-antagonistic democratic ideals that these candidates were expected to personify. As explored in earlier chapters, notions of democratic governance in both colonial and postcolonial India were oft conflated with the idea of a natural Hindu majority.10 Yet, as also previously discussed, these majoritarian democratic models could also be related to other manifestations of community at a provincial level. In the ‘Marathispeaking’ districts of Bombay, for example, this chapter argues that demands for the selection of particular Congress candidates was at times justified on the basis of their majority caste or linguistic identity within that particular electoral ward. Equally, alternate democratic ideals were carefully positioned to appeal to various imaginings of the Congress’s ostensibly impartial and egalitarian values, thereby providing both individuals and ‘minority’ communities (not only Muslim, but caste and linguistic groups) with scope for representation in provincial government. In this sense, democracy intersected with understandings of belonging and citizenship, as the selection of specific Congress candidates became one nexus around which these still novel concepts could be debated and performed.11 Most scholarship that considers the significance of community to the democratic process has focused on this period as a relative ‘moment of containment’, embodied by the decision to remove separate electorates and reserved assembly seats on the basis of community representation under the new constitution.12 Yet, this did

86

Selecting Congress candidates

not curtail the significance of community to forms of democratic participation and representative government after independence. Despite the theoretical commitment to a secularism that perceived any form of ‘communalism’, whether caste, religious or linguistic, as a threat,13 the actual workings of Nehruvian secularism in the context of the 1951–1952 elections were more complicated and ambiguous. In fact, Nehru’s own, personal desire to make the Congress truly representative meant that he found space to accommodate individuals from minority communities as candidates on party tickets. Although never formalised or uniformly implemented, these provisions helped to reinforce older colonial assumptions about the connectivity between community identity and political interest at the state-society nexus. In part, this was to damage Nehru’s otherwise concerted attempts to distinguish the Congress from other political parties, and to overcome the centrality of caste and community to forms of democratic representation. Equally, the constitutional process that apparently restricted group-based rights paralleled, at least to some extent, the supposed assimilation of non-Brahmans within the Congress Party two decades or so earlier. Anupama Rao writes, ‘By 1930, the Indian National Congress was dominated by non-Brahmins . . . so that non-Brahminism’s rural base was translated into dominance over Congress networks of power and patronage. . . . The Congress came to be associated with Maratha power’.14 Rao’s account accurately describes the basic strength of Maratha representation amongst Congress members in Bombay by the late colonial/early postcolonial period. Yet, their accession to positions of political power in the province was far from seamless and straightforward. This chapter looks to explore how non-Brahman politics were still being accommodated within the Congress Party as late as 1951, particularly as concerns about Maratha dominance characterised discussions regarding the candidate selection process in western India. As previous members of a ‘communalist’ party that could be unfavourably compared with Muslim ‘separatists’ after partition, Maratha candidates came to be scrutinised for their secular credentials. For others, the idea of a ‘natural’ Maratha majority in these electoral wards informed their understandings of democracy. This was of particular significance to the 1951–1952 provincial elections in Bombay, which were taking place in the context of continuing discussions about the prospect of linguistic reorganisation. Considerations about local demographics on the basis of community, which came to be mapped onto electoral constituencies during the candidate selection process, mirrored the desire to define ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ linguistic groups in borderline administrative districts ahead of linguistic reorganisation.15

The Congress, Non-Brahmans, and the gradual democratic transition in Bombay As Chapter 2 has already discussed in greater detail, the interwar period marked a decisive shift in the features of colonial governmentality, with the introduction of a limited franchise and the provision of some, albeit carefully measured, forms of political representation. Whilst this was a ‘semantic sleight’ used by the colonial

Selecting Congress candidates 87 authorities to secure continuing control in the context of growing pressure for selfgovernment from Indian nationalists, this transition meant ideas about equality and individual rights became increasingly commonplace in the political vocabulary of Indian subjects.16 At the same time, the colonial state, following precedents that had been palpable since the early nineteenth century, continued to invest caste, linguistic and religious communities with political value. What now changed was the way in which community came to map onto constituency in the context of electoral politics at the provincial level, in which the differential electoral weight of various communities received increased attention. These changes prompted a number of important questions for Indians, particularly around the nature of democracy, but also with regards to secularism and belonging. In some interesting ways these questions and ideas also presaged those articulated ahead of independent India’s first fully democratic elections in 1951–1952. In Bombay, the Congress Party was reorganised to better engage with this transition and to better reflect the wider society that it sought to represent. These shifts brought nonBrahmans into the organisation, many of whom had previously rejected the Congress as emblematic of ‘Brahman Raj’. Yet, their incorporation was not straightforward, and societal tensions on the basis of community came to influence the candidate selection process at this time. For the Congress High Command, their apparent foremost concern was whether participation in provincial elections would detract from their overall mission of achieving purna swaraj (‘complete independence’). For some, ‘collaborating’ with the colonial state, by engaging in the day-to-day administration of the province, might distract Congressmen from the larger cause and opened the party to accusations of complicity in the maintenance of colonial rule. For others, involvement in electoral politics and provincial administration was presented as an opportunity for individuals to develop the experience and expertise necessary to govern India after independence. Initially, the Congress decided against any direct involvement in the provincial legislatures after the 1919 Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms. Although some within the party had contested the provincial elections and worked the reforms during the 1920s and early 1930s, they had formed separate Swaraj parties to do so, whilst retaining their Congress membership. The Congress did not first fully contest elections to the provincial legislatures until 1934, after the collapse of Civil Disobedience. But it was only in 1937, in the wake of the implementation of the 1935 GOI Act, that the provincial elections offered an opportunity for Indian politicians to hold office within an ‘autonomous’ administration that had control over the entire provincial portfolio. Equally, the elections of 1937 marked a watershed in terms of political participation. The electorate was now five times larger than under the reforms of 1919 – in Bombay, this was reflected in an extension of the voting public from 2.6 per cent to 17.1 per cent of the provincial population.17 Meanwhile, the amount of seats available for elected representatives rose from 88 under the 1919 reforms to 1,585 after 1935. The Congress’s decision to contest the elections, their political platform and their choice of candidates must therefore be considered within this expanding democratic context.

88

Selecting Congress candidates

The Congress Party’s initial reticence about contesting the provincial elections, however, somewhat masks its broader engagement with the democratic transition during the interwar period. In fact, at its December 1920 session at Nagpur, the Congress had passed a new constitution that reorganised the party’s internal composition around the provinces. As already noted in Chapter 2, Provincial (or Pradesh) Congress Committees (PCCs) were now to be organised primarily on the basis of language. In Bombay (excluding Sindh), this meant the creation of four PCCs: Gujarat PCC for Gujarati speakers; Karnataka PCC for Kannada speakers; Maharashtra PCC for Marathi speakers; and Bombay PCC for the linguistically ‘cosmopolitan’ Bombay City. The new PCCs were to serve as the parent authorities of the more local representations of the party, which were now theoretically supposed to have infiltrated society to the taluka, or sub-district, level. By the late 1930s, the PCCs were also responsible for the selection of party candidates ahead of provincial elections, which would then be approved at the all-India level. At the heart of these changes were efforts to expand the Congress’s membership and representativeness. By reconfiguring its provincial organisation on the basis of vernacular languages, the Congress hoped to broaden its support base beyond an English-speaking and Western-educated elite.18 On face value, the relatively broad-based India-wide nature of support for Congress during anti-colonial campaigns and provincial elections during these years suggests that the shift in emphasis within the Congress was a success. Such backing allowed the Congress to argue that ‘the masses had transferred their allegiance from the Raj to the nationalist leadership and its party’.19 However, an expanding membership and support base during the interwar years also meant that the Congress was becoming an increasingly unwieldy ‘umbrella’ organisation, with a polyglot of different interests and concerns contained and competing for supremacy within it. This sense of a burgeoning ‘Congress system’ that partially accommodated many contending groups has become something of a historical axiom within South Asian scholarship. It anticipates the shift towards ‘one-party dominance’ in Nehruvian India, which emerged in the first two decades after independence.20 Yet, the wider implications of this insight on the workings of democratic governance have not always been as effectively explored. If we move beyond the Congress’s ideological core at the centre, in which Nehru and a small cadre of like-minded individuals envisaged democracy as non-discrimination and the recognition of individual rights, we find a more complex picture.21 In fact, this Nehruvian vision of democratic conduct was not institutionalised within the party. Amongst most provincial and district Congressmen in western India, democracy and representative government were more frequently conceptualised on the basis of majoritarian community interests. Ultimately, focusing on these more localised understandings of democracy within the party weakens previous attempts to idealise the initial democratic transition, particularly when this period is being favourably compared with the failings of democracy since Indira Gandhi’s premiership. In the Maharashtrian districts of Bombay, the Congress’s attempt to broaden its support base in the face of an increasingly representative electoral politics was evident in the incorporation of non-Brahmans, and particularly Marathas, within

Selecting Congress candidates 89 the party. Equally, its socially ameliorative rhetoric and the opportunities it provided for political power at the provincial level attracted Maratha members towards the organisation. Initially, non-Brahmans had accorded the Gandhi-led Congress a rather ambivalent reception in the early 1920s. Many continued to equate the Congress with Brahman hegemony, primarily because Chitpavan Brahmans had dominated the provincial Congress organisation under the leadership of B. G. Tilak since the late nineteenth century. In April 1921, for example, meetings held at Satara in support of Non-Cooperation ‘were said to be total failures, as the lecturer was boldly met by the Satya Shodak Samaj enthusiasts. They heckled him rather severely, chiefly on social questions and the meeting ended with cheers for the King Emperor’.22 However, because Gandhi ‘was outside the Maharashtrian conflict’, and was at odds with the Chitpavan Brahman followers of Tilak, ‘nonBrahmans in the region could [also] see him as an ally’.23 In March 1928, the first conference of the ‘Nationalist’ Non-Brahman League was held at Nasik, which permitted its members to also be affiliated with the Congress.24 And by 1930, one of the most prominent Maratha politicians, Keshavrao Jedhe, was participating in and propagating for Civil Disobedience.25 The occasion thus arose for a discussion amongst non-Brahmans about how best to participate in the new politics of interwar Bombay, particularly in the context of the next round of constitutional reforms during the 1930s. Although this was a conversation that was mainly held between a rather limited segment of privileged Marathas, many of whom had been amongst the most prominent members of the Non-Brahman Party since the early 1920s, they looked to speak on behalf of the wider non-Brahman population in the province. Central to this debate was the relationship between the Congress Party and non-Brahmans. Some urged caution about joining the Congress, concerned about the potential for their particular politics to be submerged by broader issues and concerns. Instead, they adopted an isolationist stance that continued to privilege a separate non-Brahman politics, and which would be supported by the colonial state. The majority, however, advocated that an alliance with the Congress was the most advantageous scenario through which to enhance their community’s position in a democratic system. For many prominent Marathas, this opinion was espoused despite their lack of commitment to the Congress cause. On the one side, many were cautious about taking part in Congress-led political activities. At the fifth session of the Satara District Non-Brahman Conference, held in Islampur in January 1930, the President Dongarsing Patel ‘asked non-Brahmans to beware of Congress extremists and warned them against falling into the trap of civil disobedience’. Instead, he argued that the ‘non-Brahmins . . . would never progress without the help and protection of the British Government’.26 This was an expression of the faith that some non-Brahmans continued to place in the colonial state at this time, and provides a sense of the vulnerability they felt when confronted by the nationalist movement. Yet, Patel also recognised the potential demographic potency of the non-Brahman community within a gradually expanding electorate in Bombay Province. He simultaneously ‘exhorted the nonBrahmin[s] . . . to unite and organise themselves properly so as to take full

90

Selecting Congress candidates

advantage of the voting strength of non-Brahmins at elections’.27 Not all agreed with this position, however, and others openly advocated that non-Brahmans should join the Congress. In July 1930, for example, upon his return from England, D. S. Javalkar appealed for ‘the “Marathas of Shivaji” immediately to rally round the tricoloured banner of India’.28 Javalkar had been a leading member of the NonBrahman Party in the province for some years. He had left for England a year earlier to raise awareness of the non-Brahman cause, but whilst abroad experienced forms of racial discrimination that disappointed his belief in colonial cooperation and strengthened his nationalist convictions. In response to his appeal, the Working Committee of the Non-Brahman Party disowned him.29 Although Javalkar was to go on to distinguish his Marxist-inspired peasant movement from the Congress, he continued to adhere to the belief that the Congress was a necessary vehicle for the nationalist struggle.30 Javalkar’s appeal points towards the shift in loyalties of many non-Brahmans, away from the colonial state and towards the preeminent nationalist movement, during the 1930s. This move also presaged a sharpened sense of the importance of caste demographics within the Maharashtra PCC, particularly in the context of the 1937 provincial elections. In this sense they paralleled Patel’s acknowledgement of the significance of non-Brahman demographic strength in electoral politics in Bombay, albeit now contained within the Congress organisation. Older antagonisms between Brahmans and non-Brahmans now came to be mapped onto electoral considerations, in which community was deemed synonymous with constituency. Ahead of the elections, an article in The Times of India suggested that ‘Brahmin will vote for Brahmin and if there is a good percentage of Brahmin votes in any one constituency then a Brahmin will be returned no matter what his ticket. In the same constituency a non-Brahmin may score for the same reason’.31 Similar considerations on the basis of caste, in which democracy was equated with majoritarianism, were now seen to permeate the selection of Congress candidates. In the Northern Division constituency, where four seats were to be contested for the provincial assembly, the District Magistrate of Ahmednagar claimed, ‘The three Congress candidates elected were all Non-Brahmans who had not previously taken a very active part in Congress affairs and were clearly selected for tactical reasons on account of their caste’.32 In Nasik, the District Magistrate reported in December 1936 that the Congress’s name was being used to serve the group-based aspirations of numerically dominant local communities. The magistrate suggested that one particular candidate, B. S. Hiray, ‘openly guffaws if he is called a Congressman and makes no secret of his intention of voting with the non-Brahmins’. According to the magistrate, Hiray claimed to be ‘sacrificing himself in order to secure that the Congress does not oppose other non-Brahmin candidates. He is however owing to his merits and caste almost certain to be elected himself’.33 This last example is particularly noteworthy because of Hiray’s growing significance in provincial politics. Subsequently, Hiray went on to serve as Parliamentary Secretary to Home Minister K. M. Munshi in the Congress provincial ministry in Bombay from 1937 to 1939. After independence, Hiray served as both Minister for Revenue and Minister for Agriculture in the Congress government in Bombay

Selecting Congress candidates 91 from 1952 to 1956. Perhaps most importantly, he also became President of the Maharashtra PCC in the early 1950s, and therefore presided over the selection of potential Congress candidates ahead of the 1951–1952 elections as the head of the Maharashtra Provincial Election Committee. As Chapter 3 made clear, Hiray was a strong supporter of the demand for Samyukta Maharashtra. But as the Ahmednagar District Magistrate’s report suggests, he was also a vocal advocate of nonBrahman (and particularly Maratha) interests. Whilst recognising the particularity of non-Brahman concerns and scoffing at Congress ideals, the report ultimately reveals that Hiray also spurned Patel’s isolationist stance. Rather than support the separation of non-Brahmans from the nationalist movement, Hiray positioned himself within the Congress organisation, as the best way through which to access political power in a democratising system that was increasingly dominated by one party. For Hiray and most other Maratha politicians, democracy was implicitly about the protection of majoritarian non-Brahman interests within the electoral arena. In many ways, then, the history of the integration of non-Brahmans within the Maharashtra PCC in this period was also in part the history of a creeping tide of caste majoritarianism within the democratic process. The next section of the chapter reveals how this predilection was borne out by the way Hiray handled the candidate selection process in 1951–1952.

The 1951–1952 elections and Congress candidates Both the longer devolution of political power to Indians in Bombay and the simultaneous incorporation of political representatives of the Marathas as Congress members during the last years of the Raj are worth bearing in mind when thinking about independent India’s first elections. Yet, the 1951–1952 elections were also an exceptional event, without precedent in the Indian subcontinent. They were the first elections to be held under a full adult franchise, and therefore an enormous administrative responsibility for the fledgling Indian state. For the Congress Party, its members and supporters in Bombay, meanwhile, the elections provided a unique and novel occasion through which to debate the meaning of India’s nascent democracy, and an archetype for the establishment of proper conduct in the electoral arena.34 It was in this context that the selection of Congress candidates became a site of contention, in which various understandings of democratic behaviour were proposed and contested. In turn, these emerging conceptions of democracy intersected with ideas and concerns about secularism, patronage and citizenship in a number of different ways. Questions about the selection of particular candidates frequently revolved around the continuing significance of community to forms of political participation and representative government. This was of particular importance in Bombay, in the context of an impending linguistic reorganisation and the perceived threat of Marathi/Maratha majoritarianism. The election in Bombay was a task of gigantic proportions, with nearly 22 million voters enrolled (out of a population of nearly 36 million), across an area of over 111,000 square miles.35 In view of ‘the paucity of trained election personnel’, the 27 districts were divided into three zones and polling was staggered over three

92

Selecting Congress candidates

days between 3 and 11 January, ‘to enable the staff to move from one zone to the other’.36 Some of the elaborate and lengthy preparations for polling day included the publication of electoral rolls in all the districts, the printing of over 40 million ballot papers and other forms, the manufacture of 15,000 ballot boxes and the selection of potential sites to act as polling stations, including schools, colleges, clubs and public and marriage halls.37 For every one or two districts (depending on size and significance), a full-time Assistant Electoral Officer with the rank of Deputy Collector was appointed, to make ‘arrangements for the transfer of ballot boxes, ballot papers, arrangements for the return of the boxes after polling and giving training to the staff in regard to the conduct of the elections’.38 In Bombay, the election for general (non-reserved) seats was primarily conceived as a relatively straightforward fight between the Congress Party and the Socialist Party. Meanwhile, in the seats reserved for Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs), it was expected that the Congress would compete with the Scheduled Castes Federation (SCF) for the SC vote. All parties were expected to have identified and chosen their candidates for each constituency ahead of the final deadline for receipt of party nominations by 24 November. The Congress’s manifesto looked back to their role in the achievement of independence, and promised economic development through the implementation of its first Five Year Plan. One of the central tenets of the Congress campaign across India also related to its secularism. Under Nehru’s guidance, the party officially pushed an agenda that emphasised modernisation and social egalitarianism as a means to overcome supposedly primordial religious affinities. In the post-partition context, this was meant to differentiate between a modern and secular India and a backward and religiously inclined Pakistan. But it was also used to differentiate the Congress from ‘communal’ parties within India, such as the Hindu Mahasabha, Jana Sangh and Akali Dal. Nehru presented a vote for the Congress in terms of this starkly polarised contrast between secularism and communalism: In a nation, all its citizens should have equal rights, whatever their religion. This has been put down in our Constitution, and the Congress has followed this fundamental principle all these years. . . . I am worried that what has been achieved after tremendous difficulty and sacrifices – our freedom – should not slip away or get weakened, and that we may again become backward. We will become backward unless we constantly follow a progressive path. Communalism will certainly set us back and bind us down, especially the sort of communalism shown by some of these Hindu and Sikh organizations nowadays.39 The emphasis throughout the campaign was also very much focused on Nehru and his leadership. An analysis of electoral speeches published in the Times of India in December, for example, noted that ‘Mr. Nehru is carrying the Congress election campaign on his back. . . . Clearly the successes of the Congress at the polls up to now are due in no small measure to Mr. Nehru’s exertions’.40 Yet, Nehru’s personal investment in these policies also hints at the relative paucity of the party’s backing

Selecting Congress candidates 93 for his particular brand of secularism.41 In fact, internal wrangling over the character of both the party and the state had reached crisis proportions only a year earlier, when elections to the position of party president in August 1950 were contested between Purushottamdas Tandon, who had the support of the party’s Hindu right-wing, and Nehru’s favoured socialist candidate, J. B. Kripalani. Tandon’s victory and subsequent actions ultimately prompted Nehru to resign from the Congress Working Committee (CWC) and Central Election Committee in August 1951, asking Congressmen to choose which viewpoint and outlook were to prevail. Ahead of the general elections, however, Nehru was almost certain to receive the majority of his party’s support, and Tandon, recognising the likelihood of his defeat, ultimately decided to resign. In September, Nehru was elected Congress President in Tandon’s place, but the elections were henceforth perceived as a barometer of public support for both Nehru and Nehruvian secularism. Beyond these rhetorical commitments to secularism as part of the Congress’s election sloganeering and the high politics of the party, the selection of Congress candidates provides an opportunity to explore the more substantial meanings of the Nehruvian commitment to state impartiality and party pluralism in practice. In a letter to the Chairmen of the Provincial Election Committees in September, Nehru stipulated that ‘Congress candidates must be chosen with particular care so that they might represent fully the non-communal character and approach of the Congress. Persons who have been connected with communal organisations should therefore be suspect’.42 If candidates were chosen on the basis of their caste, ‘the future Parliament will be full of men of low stature, of individuals who think all the time only of parochial interests, of their own caste and locality, and not of the entire country and its problems’.43 Nehru advocated that an emphasis on integrity, past record and agreement with the principles and objectives of the Congress, rather than ‘communalism’ and factionalism, should govern the selection of potential candidates. Yet, the question of how to ensure ‘minority’ community representation in legislative bodies in India meant this approach to the selection of candidates was softened under certain circumstances. Nehru went on in his letter to the Chairmen of the Provincial Election Committees to assert that, ‘It is not only a matter of honour for us, but something of great practical importance, that we put up representatives of the minority communities in adequate numbers’. With the abolition of separate electorates and most reserved seats, it was now considered necessary to find ‘protected seats’ for the minorities, ‘in accordance with their population’, so that joint electorates would not ultimately be considered a failure.44 For Nehru, this was principally a mechanism through which to protect the interests of India’s archetypal Muslim minority. It was in this regard that Nehru contacted Morarji Desai, to criticise the list of potential Congress candidates provided by the Bombay PCC. Nehru had advocated for the nomination of Abid Ali in Bombay, a long-serving Congressman who had participated in several satyagrahas, who had been imprisoned for the nationalist cause and who was a current AICC member. But another reason in favour of his selection that Nehru trumpeted was related to ‘his being a Muslim’ and ‘member of a minority community which we wish to encourage’.45 Despite Nehru’s intervention, the

94

Selecting Congress candidates

decision to deny Ali candidature in Bombay City was ultimately not reversed. Equally, the Maharashtra PCC was criticised by the Times of India for only including five Muslim candidates, an underwhelming proportion of the 143 seats to be contested under its jurisdiction, despite Nehru’s intervention.46 The manner in which the Maharashtra and Bombay PCCs were able to disregard Nehru’s directive on minority candidates is indicative of a number of trends in the selection process. First, it demonstrates the problems Nehru encountered in applying his personal brand of secularism to the party, to which other Congressmen were not as obviously committed in the face of particular electoral contingencies. Nehru’s directive was a plea ‘to bear in mind’ rather than an order, which could be overlooked at the provincial level.47 Second, Nehru’s directive reinforced the linkages between community identities and political interests. The fact that the issue of ‘protected seats’ was raised in the national press is indicative of the fact that Nehru’s plans for minority representation on the Congress ticket were in the public domain. It also helps account for the petitions and memorandums that were received by the Central Election Committee from Bombay, which made reference to proper representation for other minority communities (particularly on the basis of caste and language) in the selection of Congress candidates. Despite the fact that Nehru’s recommendations were not uniformly implemented, this opened the Congress up to criticism of its claims to communal impartiality in the democratic process, particularly for those who conflated secularism with an understanding of democracy as majority rule. Finally, Nehru’s emphasis on providing minorities with representation in proportion to their population strengthened the connections between demographics, community and belonging in democratic government. In choosing candidates for the national and provincial assemblies in Bombay City, for example, the Bombay PCC President and Chair of its Election Committee, S. K. Patil, adapted this idea, and suggested that representation was to be given to communities on a ‘communalwise as well as territorial-wise’ basis.48 In theory, this meant that where a community had a population of 100,000 members or more in the city, they were to be given at least one representative to contest from the place in which, as far as possible, they had the largest concentration. Yet, focusing on numbers paradoxically encouraged provincial election committees to frequently select candidates from communities that constituted majorities in local wards, which was considered the most effective means through which to mobilise popular support and attain political power. As a result, the selection process could be used to reinforce majoritarian conceptions of secularism, democracy and representative government on the basis of community. The actual procedure for choosing Congress candidates involved the various District Congress Committees (DCCs) making recommendations to the Provincial Election Committee, who could then either accept the proposed candidate or select their own nominee. Although the Provincial Election Committee made the decision about the candidates to be selected to contest the elections, the AICC permitted unsuccessful nominees, members of the party and the general public to appeal against these choices, or to send in representations against the selected candidate.

Selecting Congress candidates 95 Of the 450 rejected candidates in Maharashtra, at least 300 submitted complaints to the Central Election Board.49 The remainder of this chapter focuses upon a couple of vignettes drawn from these files of complaints on individual Congressmen in Bombay that are encompassed within the AICC Papers. The actual appeals and character assassinations contained within them might often be of doubtful veracity, but they provide a number of significant insights into the values, norms and practices of nascent democratic conduct amongst Congressmen in the region. Within the files, allegations of communal preference in the selection process were frequently contrasted with the secular principles of the party. The complainants considered below employed different understandings of secularism and democracy, whether constructed around minority rights, non-discrimination or majoritarianism, which were dependent upon their own particular situations and circumstances. Significantly, these complaints, and the selection process more broadly, served as a means through which understandings of citizenship were negotiated, particularly in the context of a forthcoming linguistic reorganisation. D. P. Tandel and the Palghar and Jawahar constituency, Thana District Our first case study concerns an appeal received by the AICC from one D. P. Tandel, a rejected Congress candidate from the Palghar and Jawahar constituency. Located to the north of Bombay City in Thana District, this constituency comprised both Palghar City near the Konkan coast and the former princely state of Jawahar in the hills, and included the connecting countryside that formed the Palghar and Jawahar Talukas (sub-districts) in between. Bordering Bombay City to the southwest, the Marathi-speaking districts of Kolaba, Poona, Ahmednagar and Nasik to the south and east, the Gujarati-speaking former princely state of Baroda to the north, and the Arabian Sea to the west, the political situation in Thana District during this period was particularly vexing for a number of reasons. First, the structure of the district’s administration caused considerable confusion and numerous disputes in the context of demands for linguistic reorganisation. Whilst its proceedings were conducted in the Marathi language, Thana had been grouped within the ‘Northern Division’ of Bombay Province, which otherwise was constituted primarily by Gujarati-speaking districts. Its location on this ambiguous and nebulous border between Marathi-speaking and Gujarati-speaking areas in the province ensured both proponents of Gujarat and Maharashtra made claims to the district in the 1940s and 1950s, or at least certain tracts within it, in anticipation of the new provincial jurisdictions. Second, Thana District was culturally and ethnically diverse, which undermined attempts to articulate exclusivist notions of linguistic belonging mentioned above. Much of the coastal regions around Bombay City, including the district administrative headquarters at Thana City, were becoming an overflow for the metropolis during the twentieth century. Owing to rapid urbanisation and migration, this southwestern corner of the district had become a site of considerable linguistic heterogeneity, with large populations of Gujarati-, Hindi-, Marathi-, and (after partition) Sindhi-speakers.

96

Selecting Congress candidates

Further up the coast, and in the mountainous interior, Thana District was home to ‘backward’ and adivasi (‘tribal’) communities such as the Kolis, Warlis, Katkaris, Dhublas, Dhodias and Gabits. British ethnographers had debated the linguistic affinities of these communities in the past, and they continued to be contested by proponents of Gujarat and Maharashtra ahead of provincial reorganisation.50 In 1948, for example, the Thana District Gujarati Conference claimed that the ‘grammar and construction’ of the adivasis’ language was ‘more akin to Gujerati than Marathi’, whilst Harsidhbhai Divatia, on behalf of the Gujarat Research Society, declared that adivasis in Thana were an indigenous, Gujarati-speaking ‘old stock . . . closely connected with the soil’.51 Marathi-speakers, on the other hand, Divatia claimed, had ‘come to Thana recently for service or for other form of maintenance’.52 It was in these larger circumstances linked to provincial reorganisation and the linguistic affinities of Palghar and Jawahar’s adivasi and ‘backward’ populations that our rejected candidate D. P. Tandel protested the decision to award the Congress candidacy to, Kumari Jayanti Shroff, a Gujarati lady, when the whole constituency is predominently [sic] Maharashtrian and of the backward classes. She is the daughter of a businessman and businessmen in Palghar can be counted on the tips of fingers. I do not know why this nonentity who cannot and does not command the confidence of voters and who has done no social work of any importance or taken any part in political activity has been selected.53 In contrast, Tandel recommended his own candidature for the seat. Reference was made to his engagement in Congress activities since 1922. He claimed to have been imprisoned three times for his involvement in the nationalist movement, as long as two years on one occasion, and for one year on another.54 On the one hand, then, Tandel sought to position his appeal within the context of Nehru’s recommendations about the selection of appropriate candidates on the basis of their past record towards the Congress cause. This was presented in stark contrast to Shroff’s apparent failure to get involved in the nationalist movement. Tandel also emphasised his participation in social work over the past 30 years in a similar manner, thereby highlighting his sense of accountability towards the local electorate. But it was at this juncture that an emphasis on community also permeated his appeal. Whereas Shroff was a Gujarati woman with links to business interests, he was ‘born a Fisherman [i.e. a Gabit] and [did] business as a fisherman and [had] done social uplift work among the fishermen and the backward class and [had] started and aided cooperative institutions of the Backward class and . . . [enjoyed] their confidence’.55 In this telling, Tandel presented himself as both representative and accountable towards his constituency on the basis of shared ethnic affinity and occupation. Shroff’s distinct disinterest in social work amongst the region’s ‘backward’ groups was presented as part of a broader provincial malaise: ‘although the Congress has many times avowed that it stands for the amelioration of the condition of the backward class and fishermen, . . . there [was] no single spokesman of that class or community’ selected as a Congress candidate in Bombay.56

Selecting Congress candidates 97 For Tandel, Shroff’s family background connected her to a longer history of antipathy between Gujarati-speaking merchants, usurers and traders, and Marathispeaking artisans, peasants and labourers in the region. Maharashtra did not have a distinct merchant caste in the pre-colonial period. Donald Attwood has suggested that the Deccan’s partially land-locked status, where steep coastal mountains cut the plateau off from the Konkan and Arabian Sea, ensured relatively few everyday commodities reached Marathi-speaking villages at this time.57 The lack of indigenous merchant castes meant some bankers, traders and moneylenders from Gujarat had gradually migrated to Maharashtra in the early modern era, particularly since the seventeenth century. In the colonial period, they increasingly served as middlemen for the state, collecting revenues from the Marathi-speaking peasant, labourer or artisan.58 During the Deccan Riots of 1875, Banias (a Gujarati trading caste) were targeted and attacked by Marathi-speaking cultivators, who resented their refusal to provide them with credit to pay an instalment of their land tax. Anti-Gujarati rhetoric during the riots presented these merchants as aliens and outsiders, who still returned to Gujarat ‘to contract marriages, or to perform important religious ceremonies’.59 By the interwar period, as a consequence of their indebtedness to the merchants and their inability to pay the land tax, adivasis in Thana had seen their land repossessed and had become tenants. As the colonial administrator D. C. Symington noted in 1938, ‘Eighty years ago [adivasis] were reported to have been the owners of the soil but the land has long since passed out of their ownership into the hands of the sowcars [usurers] who are now their landlords’.60 Tandel’s appeal tapped into this longer history of land repossession and social tension between the two communities, and presented his and Shroff’s candidacy in terms of these supposedly irreconcilable binaries: between Marathi and Gujarati speakers, on the one hand, and between ‘backward’ fishermen and ‘advanced’ businessmen (and women), on the other. Ultimately, Tandel’s petition came to nothing. The Central Election Committee rejected his candidature in early November, and backed the Maharashtra Provincial Election Committee’s decision to nominate Shroff instead. This decision had important repercussions for the party at the polls in January, when Shroff went on to lose the election by a narrow margin to the Socialist candidate. However, despite its rejection, Tandel’s petition still provides some important insights into contemporary expectations of what democratic and secular government entailed in Bombay ahead of the provincial elections. Like Nehru’s recognition of minority rights through protected seats, Tandel advocated his candidacy in Palghar and Jawahar as a vital question for India’s secularism. For Tandel, it was the Congress’s responsibility to provide adequate recognition of the backward classes in the legislature as one means through which to ameliorate their ‘backward’ condition. Where Tandel departed from Nehru’s secularism, however, was in his understanding of democratic and secular government as majority rule, and his argument that the Congress ought to select candidates on this basis. As a representative of the majority community in his constituency, Tandel contended that he was best situated to serve the majority of the electorate’s interests.61 However, his petition was also framed around an alternative conceptualisation of the majority, imagined here on the basis

98

Selecting Congress candidates

of language (and ‘backward’ caste status) rather than religion. In turn, this served as a site through which alternate understandings of belonging could be performed, constructed on the basis of Tandel’s affective connection to a particular regional, Marathi-speaking space in the wider context of an impending linguistic reorganisation. In the petition, Tandel presented adivasis and ‘backward’ communities as being an integral part of this wider sense of ‘Maharashtrian-ness’, in a way that Gujarati-speaking merchants and traders such as Shroff were not. This was built around exclusivist understandings of linguistic belonging, which rejected the validity of pluralist conceptions that held many Indians (including traders and merchants in Maharashtra) regularly conversed in multiple languages. The Marathas in Poona District Our second vignette concerns a range of appeals, petitions and complaints received by the AICC in October 1951 from disgruntled members of the party and public in Poona District.62 Poona District was situated in the centre of what would become Maharashtra, surrounded by the predominantly Marathi-speaking districts of Ahmednagar, Sholapur, Satara, Kolaba and Thana. The implications of a potential reorganisation of provincial administrative boundaries here may thus seem relatively insignificant in comparison to Thana. The introduction of democracy in the context of reorganisation in Maharashtra has perhaps most persistently been perceived as a harbinger of Marathi linguistic majoritarianism, whereby a newfound consensus between Brahmans, Marathas and other Marathi-speaking communities had coalesced around the idea of the ‘Marathi manus’, or Marathi man, in opposition to a Gujarati ‘other’.63 Equally, and as explored in greater depth earlier in this chapter, in most conventional accounts of the non-Brahman movement the Congress is seen to have overcome its association with ‘Brahman Raj’ amongst nonBrahmans in Maharashtra by the late 1930s. These historical studies thus finish their accounts of the non-Brahman movement either before or at this moment during the 1930s, at least in part giving the impression that the particularities of non-Brahmanism were subsumed and overcome by their incorporation within the Congress Party at this time.64 However, their absorption within the Congress was never a straightforward process, and some of the values that Nehru (and other leading members of the central government that shared his ideological views) professed were not easily institutionalised amongst them. In 1948 Keshavrao Jedhe briefly left the Congress, angered by the slow pace of welfare reform and the continuing dominance of Brahmans within the provincial organisation. He became one of the founding members of the Peasants and Workers Party (PWP), only to re-join the Congress in 1952. This episode also coincided with violence directed against Brahmans in many parts of Maharashtra, in reaction to Gandhi’s assassination.65 Even after non-Brahmans had joined the Congress, the rapid identification of issues in the interests of electoral contingency meant that, at particular times and in particular places, a burgeoning sense of ‘Maharashtrianness’ could be cut across and reshaped by other forms of group representation linked to caste, class, sub-region and religion. In fact, it was in Poona that the most

Selecting Congress candidates 99 frequent references to the manipulation of the selection process on the basis of ‘community’ appeared within the appeals and representations received by the AICC ahead of the 1951–1952 elections. Of central importance to the accusations about the selection of candidates in Poona were fears that in a future unilingual Maharashtra, Marathas, as the province’s most numerically preponderate caste group, would monopolise access to elected political posts. Whereas in Bombay as a whole, the strength of the ‘Maratha vote’ was diluted by the presence of Gujarati- and Kannada-speaking voters elsewhere in the province, the creation of Maharashtra would increase the percentage of Marathas amongst the provincial electorate. This process, many of the appeals suggested, was becoming increasingly evident in Poona District, where the introduction of a universal adult franchise had meant increased attention to demographics on the basis of community in the selection of Congress candidates. N. K. Gokhale, a Brahman pleader from the town of Baramati, regaled the AICC with a tale of how he was forced from local office in 1940 by the former Maharashtra PCC President Jedhe on account of his caste, and had resigned from the Baramati Taluka Congress Committee in protest. He revealed that he had applied once again to be a Congress candidate ‘to test whether the efforts and constant declarations of Nehru had any effect on the local and provincial Congress committees, which I still saw had a strong bias for community and caste’.66 Nonetheless, Gokhale’s application for candidacy was rejected. Another pleader from Baramati, W. H. Kothadiya, cited a recent statement made by the Maharashtra PCC President B. S. Hiray (a Maratha by caste) to the press.67 Whilst Hiray assured the local and national media that the Maharashtra Provincial Election Committee ‘did not think in communal terms while preparing the list of candidates’, he simultaneously asserted they had chosen only 63 Maratha candidates for the 143 seats in the Bombay Legislative Assembly, even ‘though there is an outstanding overwhelming majority of the Maratha community in Maharashtra. If properly considered they would have got more seats than they had already got’.68 For Kothadiya, this demonstrated that communal considerations had in fact infiltrated the allocation of nominees. But Hiray’s comments to the press are perhaps better interpreted as indicative of the way in which Hiray and others at the provincial level in Maharashtra perceived the workings of democracy in a secular society. In a similar manner to Tandel, Hiray here conflated secularism with an understanding of democracy as majority rule. It was the task of the Maharashtra Provincial Election Board to nominate (Maratha) candidates that would best serve the interests of the majority (i.e. Maratha/non-Brahman) community. In the selection of candidates, provincial Congressmen in Maharashtra did not adhere to the conceptualisation of secular, democratic governance favoured by Nehru, but an alternative logic of non-interference based around ‘one man one vote’ that could be used to justify the nomination of Marathas in Poona District.69 However, Kothadiya’s letter also went on to suggest that Hiray’s claims about a Maratha majority actually distorted provincial demographics: ‘In Maharashtra there are so many communities such as Malis, Dhangar, Sonar, Sali, Koshti, Shimpi, Lingayat, Brahmin, Jain, Parsi, Christian etc. etc. that if properly

100

Selecting Congress candidates

considered the number of Marathas would not be eight to ten per cent’.70 R. K. Karkhanis, a journalist from Poona City, made similar claims in his assertions about the caste composition of both the Congress’s nominations and the population of Poona District. Whilst ‘ten candidates out of 14 selected were from the Maratha community alone . . . the majority of the voters in this District is of non-Marathas (nearly double the Maratha community)’. In Karkhanis’s opinion, it was evident that Hiray and the Poona DCC President A. S. Awate, both Marathas by caste, had ‘joined hands together to suppress non-Maratha communities’ in the district.71 There was no ‘selfless worker in the Maratha community devoted to the Congress’. Rather, they were ‘all first-class opportunists taking advantage of power politics’, who had ‘vested interests for their community alone. After taking advantage of the power, they would mercilessly kick the mother Congress at any time’.72 Karkhanis’s letter hints at the ways in which the political participation of the Marathas in Bombay came under special scrutiny in 1951–1952, as a consequence of claims that they had either previously or continued to associate with communal politics. A widespread tactic employed to delegitimise Maratha candidates in the selection process was to make reference to their links to Maratha and non-Brahman parties. In Nasik District, a letter from K. D. Bora tarnished the potential candidature of Raosaheb Thorat by claiming he was a ‘communalist’ and ‘formerly a leader of the Maratha League’, who had ‘opposed the Congress candidate in the last election in 1946’.73 Another letter from L. R. Abad, the former president of the Nasik DCC, also maintained that the preferred Congress candidate for the YeolaNandgaon Constituency, M. T. Patil, was a member of the Maratha League before joining the Congress, and remained a ‘staunch communalist having affinity towards the Shetkari Kamkari [Jedhe’s PWP] Party’.74 These claims were of particular significance ahead of the 1951–1952 elections, as ideas about how to manage the transition to full adult suffrage were often accompanied by concerns about the continuing implications of partition and the potential repercussions of linguistic reorganisation. As we have already seen, Nehru placed particular emphasis on distinguishing the Congress from ‘communal’ bodies. But his antipathy was not limited to the Jana Sangh and other parties of the Hindu Right. In a speech at Allahabad in December, Nehru argued, This is not a Hindu-Muslim question, or it is only partly so. Pakistan was created because of the communalism of the Muslim League. . . . Please remember that the moment you open the doors to it, it spreads very fast as it has among the Sikhs and the Hindus in the Punjab, among the Brahmins and nonBrahmins in the south etc. . . . It is a strange situation and you must realize how dangerous it is. If we do not suppress it and fight against it or give it any scope whatsoever, it will pull India from her roots.75 Branding a Maratha candidate as a communalist provided a point of comparison with Muslim ‘separatists’, in a context in which ‘provincialism’ could easily slide into fears about further secessionism and the ‘Balkanisation’ of the subcontinent. In a similar manner, D. R. Wayase, who had applied for nomination as a Congress

Selecting Congress candidates 101 candidate in both the Indapur and Baramati constituencies in Poona, also made reference to the chosen candidate for Indapur’s communal character. Wayase was a member of the Dhangar community, a non-Brahman caste and traditionally shepherds by occupation, who had been reclassified as an ‘Other Backward Class’ for purposes of affirmative action in government service shortly after independence.76 Wayase noted that ‘the movement for national freedom was not smooth in this part, as several movements of a communal nature originated and thrived here’. For Wayase, longstanding Brahman/non-Brahman antagonisms had left a ‘legacy’ of community consciousness amongst the Marathas, which had been utilised by a certain section of Congressmen ‘to capture most places of importance’ ahead of the elections.77 He suggested that this had important implications for Dhangars and other non-Brahman groups beyond the Marathas who resided within Poona District: I found an appeal from Dhangar communalists finding ready response to break away from Congress which was being a vehicle of Maratha domination. Their demand was more and proper representation for their community in all elections. This feeling and demand by itself is not proper and commendable. But it must not be forgotten that this is a reaction to the communalism of the Marathas.78 In Wayase’s appeal we find a tension between different models of secular conduct in a democratic system. On the one hand, some Dhangars, such as Wayase, looked to hold the Congress to an ideal secular standard, in which democracy was interpreted as the recognition of individual rights and complete blindness towards communal affiliations. For its proponents, this would ensure Dhangars would not be omitted from the selection process purely on the basis of their minority caste status, and likewise guarantee Marathas were not selected simply because they constituted the majority community. But this logic of non-interference could simultaneously fall prey to majoritarian positions on Indian secularism, such as those evident in Hiray’s understanding of the candidate selection process. On the other hand, Wayase also noted how certain members of the Dhangar community made reference to democracy as an exercise in political commensuration, through which representation ought to be accorded to minority communities who would be otherwise engulfed by the advent of universal suffrage. Yet, this demand for political equalisation through recognition of their cultural exception rendered caste politically consequential in the candidate selection process, thereby reinforcing the Dhangars’ particularised and precarious status.79 This was because calls for recognition amongst the Dhangar community that were framed in this idiom could also be deemed ‘communal’, making it more difficult to object to the communal activities of the Marathas within the Congress. The terms of enfranchisement for Dhangars and other minority communities were thus bedevilled with contradictions and inconsistencies, as both of these attempts to think with and through ideas about secular and democratic conduct placed them in a difficult and circumscribed (although not ultimately insurmountable) position.

102

Selecting Congress candidates

Conclusion When the provincial election results were announced in Bombay, it was clear that the Congress had swept all before it. On average, they received just over 50 per cent of the vote in the 313 seats they contested. In a voting system organised on the principle of first-past-the-post, their proportion of seats in the provincial legislative assembly looked even more impressive. Out of the 315 seats available, the Congress had won 269. The Congress’s nearest rival in terms of seats was Jedhe’s PWP, which won a miniscule 14 seats overall, while independent candidates (many of whom were soon to align themselves with the Congress) composed 18 members of the assembly.80 As a consequence of its success, the Congress was able to form another provincial government in Bombay with Morarji Desai as its chief minister. This brief analysis of the election results might suggest a relatively smooth shift towards full adult suffrage in Bombay, in which the Congress maintained its control of provincial government. However, by examining the Congress’s candidate selection process ahead of these elections, this chapter has provided a number of opportunities to explore the contested nature of democracy in postcolonial India instead. This history problematizes any straightforward depiction of the initial success of democracy in Nehruvian India. In fact, Nehru’s own equivocal position on separate representation for minorities in the candidate selection process provides evidence of the tension between universalism and difference in his understanding of democratic conduct. Theoretically, Nehru advocated non-discrimination in political life, preferring to envisage democracy on the universal basis of individual rights. But when it came to choosing potential Congress candidates for the 1951–1952 elections, Nehru suggested that Provincial Election Committees should prioritise candidature for Muslims and other minorities in ‘protected seats’. This policy was supposed to assuage concerns amongst minorities about the potential for Hindu Raj in independent India. However, it was premised on another conception of democracy, which recognised difference and prioritised forms of political commensuration instead. In suggesting separate representation for minorities amongst Congress candidates, Nehru opened the party up to criticism of its claims to communal impartiality in the democratic process. A similar tension was also evident in the conflicting positions of the Dhangar community in Poona District. Both democracy as equality through non-discrimination, and democracy as political commensuration through the recognition of difference left them in a somewhat tenuous and unstable position when confronted by Maratha majoritarianism. If we move beyond Nehru and his supporters within the upper echelons of the Congress, a straightforward definition of democracy is even more difficult to locate. In part, this was a consequence of the nature of the Congress organisation in this period, in which it partially accommodated many competing groups with alternative political agendas. In Maharashtra, attempts to broaden the Congress’s support base during the interwar period brought prominent non-Brahman politicians into the provincial party for the first time, who did not share Nehru’s efforts to deliver equalisation through the recognition of difference after independence.

Selecting Congress candidates 103 In the party’s provincial and localised manifestations, therefore, Nehru’s attempt to provide protected seats for minorities in the selection process was generally begrudged, disregarded and never institutionalised. The petitions and memorials submitted by spurned Congressmen still pointed to the continuing significance of community in the selection process for the Maharashtra PCC. But instead of prioritising representation for minorities, the Provincial Election Committee primarily nominated Maratha candidates that they argued would best serve the interests of the majority (i.e. Maratha/non-Brahman) community instead. In this telling, democracy, despite being conceptualised on the theoretically equal basis of ‘one man one vote’, was seen to provide a justification for majority rule. In the context of partition’s repercussions and continuing demands for linguistic reorganisation, Marathas were frequently tarnished as communalists and separatists by their detractors, in which their previous and continuing links to non-Brahman political parties were emphasised. For other communities in Poona District, the accusation that Maratha candidates had been privileged in the selection process raised the spectre of the potential for Maratha majority rule in a reconstituted Maharashtrian province. However, the basis on which this majoritarian conception of democracy was theorised could shift dependent upon local circumstances. As the petition received by the Central Election Committee from D. P. Tandel in Thana District revealed, it could also be framed around an exclusive understanding of linguistic belonging. In this telling, the redrawing of provincial boundaries would provide a homeland for India’s Marathi speakers, where democracy was understood as the distribution of funds and jobs in the interests of the majority community. It is towards such reservation of government jobs on the basis of community interests that the next chapter now turns.

Notes 1 These statistics have been culled from Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, Oxford: Macmillan, 2007, pp. 133, 146. 2 Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘To Morarji Desai’, 27 October 1951, in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru [henceforth SWJN], Volume XVI, Part II, ed. by Sarvepalli Gopal, New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1994, pp. 55–57 (p. 56). 3 Sumit Sarkar, ‘Indian Democracy: The Historical Inheritance’, in The Success of India’s Democracy, ed. by Atul Kohli, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 28–29. 4 Bankey B. Misra, Government and Bureaucracy in India 1947–1976, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986; Zoya Hasan, Shyam N. Jha, and Rasheeduddin Khan, eds., The State, Political Processes and Identity: Reflections on Modern India, New Delhi: Sage, 1989; Atul Kohli, Democracy and Discontent: India’s Growing Crisis of Governability, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 5 Guha, India after Gandhi, Chapter 7. 6 Taylor Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India: Negotiating Citizenship in Postcolonial Hyderabad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 120. 7 Anastasia Piliavsky, ‘Introduction’, in Patronage as Politics in South Asia, ed. by Anastasia Piliavsky, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 1–35 (p. 3). 8 For a critique of this artificial distinction between democracy and patronage, see ibid.; David Gilmartin, ‘The Paradox of Patronage and the People’s Sovereignty’, in

104

9

10

11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28

Selecting Congress candidates

Patronage as Politics in South Asia, ed. by Anastasia Piliavsky, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 125–153. In doing so, it draws upon the insightful recent arguments of Taylor Sherman and William Gould in relation to these aspects of the 1951 elections. See Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India, Chapter 5; William Gould, Bureaucracy, Community and Influence: Society and the State, 1930s–1960s, London: Routledge, 2010, Chapter 6. See also Eleanor Newbigin, The Hindu Family and the Emergence of Modern India: Law, Citizenship, and Community, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013; Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006; Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India. Irfan Ahmad, Islamism and Democracy in India: The Transformation of Jamaat-eIslami, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009, p. 14; Mukulika Banerjee, ‘Elections as Communitas’, Social Research, 78.1 (2011), 75–98 (p. 95). Shabnum Tejani, Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History, 1890–1950, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008, Chapter 6; Rochana Bajpai, Debating Difference: Group Rights and Liberal Democracy in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011, Chapter 3. Tejani, Indian Secularism, p. 253. Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009, p. 183. See Chapter 6 for further details on boundary demarcation during linguistic reorganisation. Ranajit Guha, ‘Discipline and Mobilize’, in Subaltern Studies VII: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. by Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 69–120 (p. 71). New Delhi, National Archives of India [henceforth NAI], Government of India [henceforth GOI], Reforms Office File 102/32, ‘Note on Franchise Committee Proposals’, n.d. Gopal Krishna, ‘The Development of the Indian National Congress as a Mass Organization, 1918–1923’, Journal of Asian Studies [henceforth JAS], 25 (1966), 413–430 (pp. 415–416). Guha, ‘Discipline and Mobilize’, pp. 70–71. Rajni Kothari, ‘The Congress “System” in India’, Asian Survey, 4 (1964), 1161–1173; Paul R. Brass, ‘Factionalism and the Congress Party in Uttar Pradesh’, Asian Survey, 4 (1964), 1037–1047. William Gould, ‘Contesting “Secularism” in Colonial and Postcolonial North India between 1930 and 1950s’, Contemporary South Asia, 14 (2005), 481–494; Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India, pp. 14–15. Mumbai, Maharashtra State Archives [henceforth MSA], Government of Bombay [henceforth GOB], Home (Special) Department File 363–5 (1928), ‘Satya Shodak Samaj: Summary of Note-Worthy Events Connected with the Movement (as Gathered from the Secret Abstracts) from 1910’, Satara, April 1921. Gail Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non-Brahman Movement in Western India, 1873 to 1930, Bombay: Scientific Socialist Education Trust, 1976, pp. 244–245. ‘Non-Brahmin Conference: New Life and Wider Outlook: Rallying Round at Nasik’, Bombay Chronicle, 13 March 1928. Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society, p. 246. ‘Satara Non-Brahmin Conference: “Beware of Congress Trap”’, Times of India (Bombay), 7 January 1930. Ibid. ‘Mr. Javalkar Disillusioned: Appeals to Marathas to Join Congress: Be True to Shivaji’, Bombay Chronicle, 19 July 1930.

Selecting Congress candidates 105 29 ‘The Non-Brahmins and Mr. Javalkar’, Times of India, 22 July 1930. 30 Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society, pp. 265–266. 31 ‘The Elections Will be Fought by Persons, Not Parties: Voters’ Apathy: Bombay Presidency Prospects’, Times of India, 7 January 1937. 32 MSA, GOB, Home (Special) Department File 800 (106) D-4 (1937), ‘Extract from the Weekly Confidential Report of the District Magistrate, Ahmednagar’, 26 February 1937. 33 Ibid., File 800 (106) D-2 (1936), ‘Extract from the Weekly Confidential Report of the District Magistrate, Nasik’, December 1936. 34 Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India, Chapter 5. 35 Election Commission of India, Statistical Report on General Election, 1951 to the Legislative Assembly of Bombay, New Delhi: Election Commission of India, n.d.; J.B. Bowman, Census of India, 1951, Volume IV: Bombay, Saurashtra and Kutch, Part I: Report and Subsidiary Tables, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1953, p. 3. 36 ‘Bombay Polling to End on January 11: Mofussil Elections Spread Over Nine Days’, Times of India, 9 November 1951. 37 Ibid. 38 ‘Appointment of New Officers: Bombay Election Plan’, Times of India, 11 October 1951. 39 Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘The Relevance of Mahatma Gandhi: Speech at a Public Meeting, Delhi’, 2 October 1951, in SWJN, Volume XVI, Part II, ed. by S. Gopal, New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1994, p. 115. 40 ‘Mr. Nehru’s Vague World: Analysis of Election Speeches: By Vivek’, Times of India, 19 December 1951. 41 For the wide range of positions on secularism within the Congress Party, including those suggested by Tandon and other conservative Hindus within the party, see Gould, ‘Contesting “Secularism”’. 42 Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘To Chairmen, Pradesh Election Committees’, 19 September 1951, in SWJN, Volume XVI, Part II, ed. by S. Gopal, New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1994, pp. 34–35; see also, Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘The Right Kind of Candidates: Resolution Drafted by Jawaharlal Nehru and Passed by the Congress Working Committee, Bangalore’, 10 July 1951, in SWJN, Volume XVI, Part II, ed. by Sarvepalli Gopal, New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1994, p. 33. 43 Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘Quiet Strength and Avoidance of a War Mentality: Speech at Ramlila Ground, New Delhi’, 29 July 1951, in SWJN, Volume XVI, Part II, ed. by Sarvepalli Gopal, New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1994, pp. 61–62. 44 Nehru, ‘To Chairmen, Pradesh Election Committees’, pp. 35–36. 45 Nehru, ‘To Morarji Desai’, 22 October 1951, in SWJN, Volume XVI, Part II, ed. by S. Gopal, New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1994, p. 47; Nehru, ‘To Morarji Desai’, 27 October 1951, in SWJN, Volume XVI, Part II, ed. by Sarvepalli Gopal, New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1994, p. 55. 46 ‘Non-Congress Talent Not Chosen from Maharashtra: Mr. Nehru’s Advice Goes by Board: Poona Reaction’, Times of India, 6 October 1951. 47 Nehru, ‘To Chairmen, Pradesh Election Committees’, p. 34; for a similar point, see Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India, pp. 135–136. 48 New Delhi, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library [henceforth NMML], Bombay Pradesh Congress Committee [henceforth BPCC] Papers, File 10 (1951–1953), ‘Minutes of the Meeting of the Bombay Pradesh Election Committee’, 29 September 1951. 49 ‘Finalising List of Congress Candidates: Maharashtrian Elections’, Times of India, 28 October 1951. 50 For more on the manner in which the proponents of Gujarat and Maharashtra frequently exploited adivasi rights in the context of linguistic reorganisation, see Chapter 6. 51 MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 2875/46 – Pt. II (B Class), ‘Representation from Thana District Gujerati Conference, Sanjan [Dahanu], to the Linguistic

106

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64

65

66

67 68 69 70 71 72

Selecting Congress candidates

Provinces Commission’, n.d.; Harsidhbhai Divatia, Linguistic Limits of Maha Gujarat, Bombay: Gujarat Research Society, 1948, pp. 19–20. Divatia, Linguistic Limits of Maha Gujarat, pp. 19–20. NMML, AICC Papers, File 4495 (1951), ‘Letter from D.P. Tandel, Post Satpati, Taluka Palghar, District Thana, to the Chairman, Central Election Committee, New Delhi’, 11 October 1951. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Donald W. Attwood, Raising Cane: The Political Economy of Sugar in Western India, Boulder: Westview Press, 1992, pp. 293–294. Deccan Riots (Richey) Commission, 1875, Appendix A: Papers Relating to the Indebtedness of the Agricultural Classes in Bombay and Other Parts of India, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1876, p. 5. Ravinder Kumar, Western India in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in the Social History of Maharashtra, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968, p. 34; see also, David Hardiman, Feeding the Baniya: Peasants and Usurers in Western India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996. David C. Symington, Report on the Aboriginal and Hill Tribes of the Partially Excluded Areas in the Province of Bombay, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1938, p. 29. In a separate note produced by the Maharashtra PCC regarding Tandel’s candidature, his claim that the backward classes represented a majority in the electoral ward was disputed. See NMML, AICC Papers, Part II, File 4502 (1951). Prachi Deshpande, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700–1960, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, pp. 195–197. Rosalind O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 [1985]; Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society; Madhav S. Gore, The Non-Bramhan Movement in Maharashtra, New Delhi: Segment Book Distributors, 1989. Maureen Patterson, ‘The Shifting Fortunes of the Chitpavan Brahmins: Focus on 1948’, in City, Countryside, and Society in Maharashtra, ed. by Donald W. Attwood, Milton Israel, and Narendra K. Wagle, Toronto: University of Toronto, Centre of South Asian Studies, 1988, pp. 35–58. NMML, AICC Papers, Part II, File 4502, ‘Letter from N.K. Gokhale, Pleader and Bagayatdar, Baramati, District Poona, to the Chairman, Central Election Committee, “Appeal against the Rejection of Application by the Maharashtra Provincial Election Committee, Poona”’, 12 October 1951. ‘Finalising List of Congress Candidates: Maharashtra Elections’, Times of India, 28 October 1951. Ibid.; NMML, AICC Papers, Part II, File 4502, ‘Letter from Walchand Heerachand Kothadiya, Pleader, Baramati, to the Chairman, Central Election Board, “Misleading Statement of Shri Hire”’, 30 October 1951. In this way it foreshadowed the ‘positive secularism’ articulated by Hindu nationalists since the 1980s, which rejected a ‘pseudo-secularism’ that was based around both the recognition of minority rights and non-discrimination. NMML, AICC Papers, Part II, File 4502, ‘Letter from Walchand Heerachand Kothadiya’. Ibid.; ‘Letter from R. K. Karkhanis, Journalist, Poona, to the Chairman, Central Parliamentary Board, “Wrongful Selections of Congress Candidates for Assembly and Parliament (Poona Centre)”’, 12 October 1951. Ibid.

Selecting Congress candidates 107 73 NMML, AICC Papers, Part II, File 4504, ‘Letter from K.D. Bora, Ashewadi, Taluka Dindori, to the Chairman, Congress Parliamentary Board’, 13 October 1951. 74 Ibid.; ‘Letter from L.R. Abad, Ex-President, Nasik District Congress Committee, to the President, Central Parliamentary Board, AICC, “An Appeal against the Recommendation of the Candidates for Yeola-Nandgaon Constituency District Nasik, of the Bombay State, by the MPCC, Parliamentary Board”’, n.d. October 1951. 75 Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘Speech at a Public Meeting in Allahabad’, 12 December 1951, in SWJN, Volume XVII, ed. by Sarvepalli Gopal, New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1995, p. 56. 76 See Chapter 5 for further details. 77 NMML, AICC Papers, Part II, File 4502, ‘Letter from Devrao Ramrao Wayase, to the Chairman, Central Election Committee, “Appeal against the Decision of the Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Election Committee”’, n.d. 78 Ibid. 79 Rao, The Caste Question, pp. 20–23. 80 Election Commission of India, Statistical Report on General Election, p. 12.

5

Region, reservations and government recruitment

This chapter focuses upon the intellectual arguments behind bureaucratic reservations in Bombay Province during the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the implications of their operation. These forms of reservation drew upon the language of political commensuration, broadly defined on the basis of community interests, which has ‘historically and culturally specified’ the experience of liberal democracy in late colonial and postcolonial South Asia.1 According to this logic, religion and caste were rendered politically consequential, whereby communities as constituents engaged with the language of both equality and commensuration to make their demands on the state on the basis of their educational and social ‘backwardness’, and/or their demographic status. The colonial state, meanwhile, presented itself as a neutral arbiter, as the only body capable of mediating between these myriad and conflicting community interests. Yet, as the state itself was a many-headed and fuzzy entity, capable of introducing different legislative initiatives in different spatial arenas, the manner in which these demands were recognised, negotiated and represented diverged from province to province. As a result, the forms of affirmative action introduced in interwar Bombay’s civil service were markedly different from the policies enacted at the all-India level, and also departed from those introduced in other provincial administrative arenas. In fact, the nature and form of reservation depended upon the social composition and prevailing tensions of the particular region in which they were located. Although there were degrees of overlap, reservations in the north were most frequently perceived by colonial administrators and Indian politicians to be shaped by religious concerns. In the south and west, antagonisms between different sections of the public were more often identified as occurring on the basis of caste. This chapter will investigate the ‘everyday’ articulations of citizenship through reservations in bureaucratic recruitment with regards to two specific themes. First, it will consider these ideas in the context of the existing historiography on affirmative action, which was created and justified by both colonial and postcolonial states on the basis of the necessity of representing particular ‘community’ interests. By paying closer attention to the different spatial complexities of the state and how the practices of its more localised manifestations were shaped in its interactions with societal exigencies and concerns, we can understand why reservations were implemented differently from one administrative space to the next. In fact, a

Region, reservations and government 109 western Indian ‘pre-history’ of reservations during the colonial period anticipated the more recent moves towards ‘universal backwardness’ with the implementation of reservations for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in the 1990s. As the final part of this chapter reveals, the forms of group-based recruitment to the bureaucracy created in interwar Bombay for ‘Backward’ and ‘Intermediate’ classes were cited as an influential example for future practice in both the post-independence Constituent Assembly debates and in the 1955 report of the Backward Classes Commission (BCC), despite attempts by the Nehruvian Congress to stifle legislation on group-based forms of representation. Second, the provincial practices of the Bombay Government with regards to reservations will be investigated through detailed examples of the different policies followed in the various stratums of the provincial bureaucracy. There existed contrasting approaches to reservations in the different echelons of the services in Bombay, with some ostensibly focused on uniformity and merit in the selection process, whereas others were more concerned with proportionality and the ‘uplift’ of needy sections of the population. Rather than mere responses to state-generated definitions, lobby groups challenged the colonial state’s approach to reservations in a number of ways. Some demanded the reclassification of their community as Intermediate or Backward, albeit within the existing classificatory framework. Others offered a more fundamental critique of the current system, by articulating hybrid and overlapping identities that exposed inconsistencies in the provincial government’s definitions. Some went further still, challenging the entire foundations of Bombay’s classification criteria around caste and community interests and advocating economic considerations as the basis for affirmative action instead. However, all seemed to adhere to the basic principle that Bombay’s burgeoning democracy should entail some degree of bureaucratic power sharing between different communities. Bombay’s reservation policy also deviated considerably from both all-India and other provincial reservation programmes, despite a theoretical commitment to the same overarching principles, because of alternative and localised societal circumstances. In this regard, the impact of the ‘provincialisation’ of politics on the nature of reservations, as a result of the Government of India Acts of 1919 and 1935, was highly significant. In fact, in the Subordinate Services in Bombay, reservations were introduced in proportion with the demographic strength of particular ‘classes’ rather than on the basis of ‘minority’ community interests. This reflected similar practices in Bengal, Punjab and Sindh, where Muslim-majority interests were provided with reservations in government employment. Unlike in the north, however, Muslims in Bombay were included within the large and amorphous ‘Intermediate’ class alongside numerically preponderate non-Brahman castes such as the Marathas and Lingayats. Simultaneously, this Muslim minority was defined as a homogeneous bloc, despite differences of class, language, sect and region – all Muslims were grouped within this Intermediate class, regardless of their own personal circumstances. These decisions ensured Muslims remained relatively marginalised in government employment in Bombay, and were unable to claim backward status, which was defined on the basis of caste and considered the preserve of ‘Hindu’ communities.

110

Region, reservations and government

In contrast to the Muslims of Bombay Province, the Marathas stood to benefit from the GOB’s particular form of classification, dominating the provisions set aside for Intermediates because of their own local numerical strength. This was justified through a majoritarian conception of popular democracy, in which Marathas deserved to staff the administration because they constituted the majority community in particular districts. As a result, many individuals and groups from other communities included in the Intermediate class resented the Maratha dominance of the Subordinate Services and called for further forms of group-based reservation that would provide representation for a greater cross-section of the population. But as the exact boundaries of Maratha-ness were always rather difficult to define, some Marathispeaking non-Brahman groups also looked to claim Maratha status, so as to better access the reservations provided for the Intermediate class. In doing so, the ranks of the Marathas could be further swelled. Ultimately this notion of democratic community entitlement to reservations based on numerical preponderance or ‘majority’ status was one factor that helped inform and shape the growing demands for homogeneous provincial units (whether on the basis of religion, language or caste) as a form of popular government during the late colonial period.

The provincial services and ‘Advanced’ classes Across British India, the interwar period gave rise to new ideas about government service. In response to the general political climate fostered by educated, urban elites in the aftermath of the Great War, those responsible for the constitutional reforms of 1919 took up the issue of the ‘Indianisation’ of the Indian Civil Service (ICS), and the composition of this highly educated cadre of bureaucrats changed dramatically.2 Despite these changes in personnel, the ICS continued to be considered somewhat distinct from the lower, provincial levels of the services, which had always been dominated by Indians.3 Those working in the ICS treated their lowerlevel colleagues with disdain, whereby their provinciality was treated as evidence of their tendency to become embroiled in the everyday intrigues of local politics. On the other hand, the ICS was considered above such machinations, evident in its supposed impartiality when dealing with wider Indian society. In this telling, the lower levels of the administration became a site where local influence could be effectively exerted, and became ‘tied into notions of “corruption” in the official mind of British India’.4 The composition of the administration also served as a prominent theme in the political agitation of educated Indians at this time. Writing in September 1945, V. L. Thube, a member of the Bombay Legislative Assembly (BLA), argued that particular educated classes amongst provincial society ‘got higher posts in Government service and they got political power while we [the Marathas of Bombay Province] remained behind and uncared for’.5 Government service was perceived as a profitable avenue to political and executive power within the colonial system, particularly whilst the franchise remained highly limited.6 As Thube’s letter suggests, the exercise of political influence through the provincial services was also imagined on the basis of community interests, particularly around the competition for government jobs between different communities.

Region, reservations and government 111 Lobby groups created to represent particular castes and communities, such as Thube’s All India Maratha Educational Conference, became adept at canvassing for jobs through this idiom. They were encouraged to do so by the colonial state’s understanding of community as an all-pervading presence in Indian life. In fact, the provincial government in interwar Bombay recognised particular ‘communal committees’ for recruitment purposes, including organisations that claimed to represent the interests of Muslims, Marathas and other particular communities.7 In this telling, the belief in the provincial officer’s propensity to become embroiled in local intrigues necessitated the balancing out of caste and community interests within the services, and the provision of reservations for disadvantaged groups. As Bombay’s Depressed Classes and Aboriginal Tribes Committee of 1930 noted, ‘One of the difficulties of a Backward Class candidate is that he has no friends in the offices and does not know how and when to apply to the many officers who make clerical appointments in their own Departments’.8 Instead, when vacancies arose, the Committee argued, officers often privileged the recruitment of relatives, friends and colleagues from within their own communities. In an effort to more effectively balance representation within the services, the GOB introduced a system that classified various communities as diverse as lowstatus caste Hindus, ‘untouchables’ and ‘tribals’ as ‘Backward’ for the first time in 1925, prescribing ‘a minimum percentage of recruitment from members of the Backward Communities to the clerical staff of all Departments in the Presidency proper’.9 These bureaucratic reservations coincided and paralleled another communal classification for educational purposes, which fixed a minimum percentage of ‘Backward’ classes to be admitted to Primary Teacher Training Colleges. These rather broad and overlapping arrangements, however, caused considerable ambiguity and confusion both amongst the public and within governmental policy. In November 1928 the GOB appointed a special Depressed Classes and Aboriginal Tribes Committee, tasked with recommending measures for the ‘uplift’ of these groups. Reporting back in 1930, the Committee proposed (alongside a number of other proposals related to education, land reform and indebtedness) ‘that the nomenclature of classifications . . . should be changed’.10 By 1933 the Government of Bombay had decided to classify homogenised caste and religious communities into ‘Advanced’, ‘Intermediate’ and ‘Backward’ classes, a policy which was continued under the first (1937–1939) and second (1946–1951) Congress governments in the province. Brahmans, who dominated the civil service, were classed as ‘Advanced’ alongside other traditionally literate communities such as Kayastha Prabhus, Parsis and Banias.11 The ‘Intermediate’ category, meanwhile, was primarily represented by communities involved in the non-Brahman movement, most prominently the Marathas in Maharashtra and the Lingayats in Karnataka.12 It was also deemed the most suitable class for all of Bombay’s Muslim population, and the large agrarian Patidar-Kanbi caste cluster in Gujarat. Finally, Dalits (re-designated as Scheduled Castes [SCs] by the colonial state), Adivasis (or Scheduled Tribes [STs]), and a special ‘Other Backward Communities (OBCs)’ category (a disparate collection of communities which included all those deemed ‘Criminal Tribes’), were

112

Region, reservations and government

classified as ‘Backward’.13 This arbitrary division of communities into three broadly defined classes for the purposes of bureaucratic reservation, and the contradictory language in which reservations for different levels of the services were defined, ensured that the provision of these political safeguards precluded some groups and benefited others. Simultaneously, these provisions both paralleled and diverged from those enacted in northern India and at an all-India level in a number of interesting ways. In the highest stratum of the provincial administration, generally referred to as the Provincial Services, no percentage of recruitment from any class was fixed. The reasoning behind this decision was ostensibly couched in the language of intellectual merit and administrative efficiency, by foregrounding the state’s supposed impartiality. ‘If the standard of the Provincial Service is to be maintained’, claimed a note jointly written by the Commissioners of the Northern, Central and Southern Divisions of the Province, ‘it would be most undesirable in our opinion that a definite percentage for the recruitment of Backward and Intermediate Classes should be prescribed’.14 The emphasis here, then, was on a detached, efficient and monolithic state, objectively arbitrating social conflict – theoretically, the state would avoid discrimination against any citizen on the basis of their community. Beyond the smokescreen of balanced neutrality, however, was a tendency to encourage particular communities to fill such posts on account of their own specific virtues and merits. The aforementioned note, for example, went on to read, ‘for higher appointments the bulk of the candidates must still be found in those classes where there is a hereditary tradition of culture, a high standard of intelligence and a full appreciation of the value of education’.15 In a largely illiterate society, this policy continued to primarily privilege a Brahman service elite, who had first emerged under the Sultanates and Mughals in fifteenthand sixteenth-century western India. These Muslim kingdoms of the Deccan had inaugurated complex systems of governance that relied upon pre-existing literate members of the local population, employed to keep records of land ‘ownership’ and tax collection. Brahmans, as priests trained in the reading and writing of religious texts, found themselves in a position of key advantage to undertake these roles.16 Their status was enhanced by the rise of the hereditary Peshwa (the Brahman ‘prime minister’) within the early eighteenth-century Maratha polity. Brahmans ‘connected to the polity . . . became the administrators of the newly conquered regions as well as in the expanding bureaucracy at the centre’.17 The Peshwa made use of kin and caste networks to form the core of an administrative and tax-collecting elite, as well as promoting Chitpavan Brahman banking families whose credit was crucial for funding Maratha military campaigns and the effective functioning of government. Equally, when the EIC extended and consolidated its control across western India during the nineteenth century, Brahmans were perfectly placed to emphasise their ‘natural’ position as the spokesmen of indigenous society.18 Brahman ascendancy existed behind a smokescreen of nineteenth-century British liberalism – seemingly providing equal access to

Region, reservations and government 113 education, whilst widening opportunities for administrative and political power amongst previously marginalised social groups, in reality it created prospects primarily for those who could already read and write.19 In 1887 the Public Services Commission found that 41.25 per cent of the deputy collectors, 75.5 per cent of the mamlatdars (administrative heads of sub-districts) and 70 out of 104 subordinate judges were Brahmans in the Bombay Presidency, despite the fact they constituted only 4 per cent of the population.20 In interwar Bombay the Provincial Services remained primarily the domain of the Brahmans and other ‘Advanced’ classes, despite the introduction of the classificatory system. By 1939, 71.5 per cent of appointments for this level of the provincial bureaucracy still came from the ‘Advanced’ category (and only 0.3 per cent from the ‘Backward’ classes).21 Indeed, Brahman dominance of the bureaucracy was deemed inevitable by some within the administration, since they were considered ‘the best at secretarial and administrative work’.22 This was evident in the Bombay Government’s Political and Services Department’s response to a petition from the Assistant Director of (Army) Recruiting, Southern Area, during Governor’s rule in the province in the midst of the Second World War. The Assistant Director requested that the Department do all it could to push for the employment of more Marathas in the highest-level Provincial Services, as an encouragement for Marathas to enlist in the war effort. The Department’s response, however, was unequivocal: So far Marathas in the Deccan area have shown no ability to stand up to the Brahman castes in the matters of adroitness and quickness of brain, which gets persons on in Government service and if the number of Marathas in such appointments is disappointingly small, the educational and perhaps psychological makeup of the Marathas has a lot to do with it.23 Similar inclinations in the recruitment process were also evident under the Congress-led Bombay Government, which came to power after the 1937 provincial elections. In deciding upon a candidate from Bombay for recruitment to the All-India Police Services, for example, the Home Minister K. M. Munshi agreed with the Inspector General of Police that there was no need to either restrict the level of competition or forward the special nomination of an ‘untouchable’, despite the underrepresentation of the ‘Backward’ classes at this level of the administration. The suggestion by the Chief Minister B. G. Kher, that the Home Department consider a Harijan (the Gandhian term for the SCs) candidate elicited a blunt response from Munshi. He argued, ‘[The] . . . Department’s attempts to secure good Harijans are being made but the specimen of candidates I have seen are scarcely encouraging. The proposal should be dropped’.24 Despite the claims of colonial policymakers and nationalist politicians to objectivity and broad all-India representativeness, the prospects of ‘Intermediate’ and ‘Backward’ classes gaining employment in the highest levels of the administrative structure therefore remained limited in practice. The highest echelons of the state in Bombay continued to be the preserve of particular caste-based elites.

114

Region, reservations and government

The Inferior Services and ‘Backward’ classes Perhaps the biggest problem was the centrality that both the colonial state and Congress politicians in Bombay continued to afford to definitions of community in the classificatory process. Despite declaring that the categorisation of individuals on the basis of their ‘class’ would allow the Government to avoid making distinctions in these terms, communal considerations rather than an individual’s economic or educational status were actually used to decide to which ‘class’ they belonged.25 The contradictory nature of this decision was discussed in 1946, when the Congress Government in Bombay responded to the petition of an individual who had refused to list his son’s caste or sub-caste on the registration form at his new school, claiming that it ‘sanctioned communalism’.26 The school authorities had insisted on it being recorded, on account that the information had to be furnished to the Government. Whilst acknowledging the potential such forms had for ‘developing the caste-complex’ in children, the GOB went on to argue that if they did not state their caste, ‘It is difficult to say whether they belong to the Advanced, Intermediate or Backward communities’, thereby restricting their access to any educational concessions.27 It was therefore imperative that caste information was recorded so as to ascertain whether a particular candidate for recruitment fell within the reservation guidelines. Despite the new emphasis on class, the rights of citizens to various forms of affirmative action continued to be mediated through the prism of community. As discussed in further detail in the next chapter, the enumerative technologies employed by the colonial state through the decennial census after 1857 helped establish the political significance of community, by classifying and ascertaining the quantitative difference between various social groups. This was primarily demarcated on the basis of religion, and principally constituted as Hindu ‘majority’ and Muslim ‘minority’ (with various other religious minorities, such as Sikhs and Christians, making up smaller percentages of the population). The British legitimised colonial authority in India on their ability to effectively mediate between Hindu majority and Muslim minority, who they treated as qualitatively commensurate, despite these differences in number. In this understanding, both Hindu and Muslim were homogenised: united by faith with their fellow believers, and each deemed subject to the laws of their respective communities.28 At the same time, however, the census also privileged caste as a form of social hierarchy within Hinduism, and required Hindus to categorise themselves on the basis of their caste community. Therefore, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, distinctions on the basis of caste at the census had also encouraged the further development of distinct identities for both the bahujan samaj (the non-Brahman ‘majority’) and the Dalit (Depressed/Scheduled Caste) ‘minority’ in western India. By the early twentieth century, the shift towards a gradual and limited form of franchise and representative government meant that the quantitative differences between Hindus and Muslims came to be increasingly expressed in terms of their differential electoral weight. In this context, it was imperative for caste Hindus that the Depressed Classes be included within the Hindu fold, in an effort to bolster their

Region, reservations and government 115 community’s overall numbers vis-à-vis the Muslim minority. Simultaneously, some Muslims, such as the Aga Khan in 1906, sought to destabilise the numerical strength of the Hindus by claiming the Depressed Classes were ‘properly speaking . . . not Hindus at all’.29 Although full suffrage under colonial rule remained ultimately illusive, these discourses of democracy and equality helped foster a unique ‘colonial genealogy of rights’ in South Asia, constructed around claims to political equality on the basis of community.30 Rather than moving towards a more abstract universalism based entirely around the individual rights-bearing citizen, the advent of liberal democracy in India was therefore to entrench the importance of community in new ways. This was the case with the expansion of community representation in the lowest stratum of the administration in Bombay, the ‘Inferior Services’. Unlike the Provincial Services, categorisation on the basis of community was proclaimed essential to the reservation policy followed at this level. Here, the ‘Intermediate’ classes were already relatively well represented (69.6 per cent of all ‘Inferior’ jobs in 1939), and instead the Bombay Government undertook to bring in more representatives from the ‘Backward’ classes.31 The SCs in particular received a further 10 per cent reservation for Inferior jobs, whilst the Backward classes as a whole also benefited from a fixed 10 per cent for recruitment to the middle stratum of the provincial bureaucracy, the ‘Subordinate Services’.32 The affirmative action strategies followed in these lowest levels of the provincial bureaucracy towards Backward classes in Bombay correlated with similar prerogatives in the north of the subcontinent and at the all-India level. SCs were provided with a reservation of 12.5 per cent of vacancies filled by direct recruitment in the all-India services by the late 1930s.33 Likewise, under the first constitution of an independent India in 1950, SCs and STs were granted reserved quotas of 14 per cent and 7 per cent in government jobs, to ensure participation and access amongst groups who had been historically subjected to caste discrimination.34 Critical to these forms of reservation was the desire to provide political recognition for the Dalit minority. Reservations for SCs and STs were rationalised by the colonial state in the language of imperial liberalism, on the basis that these demographically defined minority communities required the state’s special protection because of their social, political and educational ‘backwardness’. There were more practical dimensions to this too, related to countering the Congress’s claims to all-India representativeness, and thereby maintaining colonial control. However, such rhetoric was also central to the provincial Congress’s justification for continuing with certain types of bureaucratic reservations for ‘Backward’ classes after accepting office in Bombay in 1937, and again when the party formed India’s first independent national government a decade later. All invoked the principle that it was the state’s ‘duty’ to see that all communities received their ‘proper share’ of employment in the bureaucracy, with special standards applying to those who, by reason of their ‘illiteracy and backward condition’, would not normally be able to gain such jobs.35 SCs and STs could, at various moments, be considered a particularly important sub-section of the citizenry who required the state’s special protection – in an era of constitutional reform and the steady realisation of forms of self-government,

116

Region, reservations and government

their interests were perceived as likely to be swamped under the growing tide of democratisation and the Indianisation of the administrative services. During the interwar period, however, the more extensive forms of affirmative action provided for Muslims, who were considered to constitute ‘India’s modal political minority’, tended to overshadow the bureaucratic reservations introduced for SCs at the all-India level and across the provinces of the north.36 Reservations for Muslim minorities in the administration to some extent replicated the separate electorates provided for Muslims since 1909 in the legislature, and were expected to diminish the spectre of Hindu majoritarianism within an expanding franchise and increasingly representative forms of government. Treated as a homogeneous bloc, despite their sectarian, linguistic and class differences, Muslims were seen to constitute a sizeable minority community of 22.2 per cent of the subcontinent’s population in the 1931 census.37 This had a direct impact on colonial state reservation policy. At the all-India level, one-third of all permanent vacancies for direct recruitment were to be reserved ‘for redress of communal inequalities’ as a result of a debate in the Council of State in 1925.38 Despite the claim by British policymakers that the strategy was not ‘negative in nature, i.e. it does not undertake to secure representation for any particular community’, this recruitment policy recognised ‘that Muslims are entitled to the largest proportion of [vacancies]’.39 Similar prerogatives shaped provincial reservation policy in north India. In the United Provinces (UP)’s Civil Executive and Subordinate Excise Services, Muslims were provided with respective set quotas of 33.3 and 33 per cent of all jobs.40 The obligation to protect the rights and privileges of minorities thus tended to be most often mediated by the colonial state at the all-India level and in the north on the basis of religious community interests. Equally, because this obligation was most often substantiated in opposition to a generalised numerical majority, this ‘general’ interest was also normalised on the basis of religion, in which the language of universal rights became synonymous with a Hindu constituency. When this majoritarian conception of democracy was applied to bureaucratic affirmative action, it meant that the remaining non-reserved vacancies in government employment were implicitly considered as a space that would be primarily set aside for Hindu representation. However, the meanings of minority and majority could also alter and shift dependent upon the particular situated perspectives of those that it engaged. In 1928, J.D.V. Hodge, a particularly perceptive civil servant in the Government of India (GOI)’s Home Department, noted the discrepancies and divergences in governmental policy regarding reservations across India after the introduction of dyarchy, and the different implications and manifestations of the meaning of minority that occurred as a result. He argued that ‘The recruitment with which we are concerned is made in several provinces, and [the Auditor General] suggests that the term “minority community” must bear a different significance in different parts of India. To us the term practically means “Non-Hindu”. This classification is appropriate enough for Northern India and Bengal, but it loses its value considerably in Madras, where the local Government have adopted a different classification to suit

Region, reservations and government 117 local conditions. It would not be in accordance with our intention to allow Brahmans to swamp two-thirds of the vacancies’.41 As a result, communitarian rights claims came to be contingent on the particular socio-historical context in which they were framed. Whereas in the north and at an all-India level, minority came to be principally associated with Muslim interests, both the state and public in western India instead considered it primarily as a justification (alongside the notion of ‘backwardness’) for affirmative action for the ‘Backward’ classes. This category, as we have already noted, included the SCs and STs, but was not restricted solely to them. In fact, individuals from a range of different communities in western India carefully engaged with the idiom of minority in their efforts to both extract the maximum concessions available from the provincial state and access the competent benefits of state employment. In doing so, affective ties at the local and provincial level cut across an imagined, immutable and homogenised Hindu majority, problematising the construction of this community by both the colonial state and nationalists. Even relatively wealthy, literate and politically conscious communities, that might have otherwise shunned such demeaning labels, now looked to invoke their ‘backwardness’ when facing the state. In November 1938, the GOB received a ‘Petition from certain Daivadnya caste people residing in Kanara’ for their reclassification as ‘Backward’. Although looked down upon by some other Brahman communities, the Daivadnyas considered themselves to be a Brahman sub-caste originally from Goa.42 Many members of the community had a family background of government service, whilst others were involved in the lucrative jewellery trade and minting coins under the Marathas, Portuguese and British. Yet, despite this relatively prosperous heritage, the petitioners contended that they formed a ‘very small minority of 17,000 souls in a population of 417,000 souls in Kanara District’, with a ‘very insignificant ratio of government service even taken on a population point of basis’.43 Likewise, the Ahir Sonars of Jalgaon city in East Khandesh District, looking back on the redefinition of their nomenclature, claimed, ‘We were classed as “Backward” with a view to give us the necessary help to which a minority is entitled, but then all of a sudden we found ourselves in the company of “Intermediates”’.44 These petitions reveal the trouble the GOB experienced in classifying entire communities within a particular class. The compound Ahir Sonar brought together Ahir (a community engaged in cow-herding and agriculture) and Sonar (a community of goldsmiths), and came to mark out those Ahirs who had diversified away from their ‘traditional’ occupation and attained a commensurate higher social status. As a result, the government treated all Ahir Sonars as belonging to the Intermediate class. Yet, the amalgamated nature of their appellation meant the Ahir Sonars could equally lay claim to a ‘backward’ and ‘minority’ status when approaching the state. The focus on backwardness and minority status in the context of Bombay’s particularised forms of bureaucratic reservation, which focused on fitting homogenised communities into particular classes, had important implications in the aftermath of independence and partition. Whilst the construction and

118

Region, reservations and government

articulation of minority rights for the new Congress-led GOI was caught up in a reciprocal relationship with Pakistan related to religion, particularly in the context of mass migration, refugee rehabilitation and ‘secular’ constitutional commitments, it was articulated slightly differently in Bombay. Here the vocabulary of swaraj, self-government and democratisation was linked to calls for the linguistic reorganisation of provincial administrative boundaries on linguistic lines. As the next chapter also suggests, the definition of minority rights in Bombay was thus primarily conditioned by concerns about adequate safeguards for these minorities, and was commonly enacted through conceptualisations of minority on the basis of caste and language. In part, this was a reaction to the perceived threat of majority or numerically preponderate castes and linguistic groups dominating a reorganised and democratised province.

The Subordinate Services and ‘Intermediate’ classes This brings us back to the idea of the ‘provincialisation’ of state legislative practices, and it also provides an angle through which to consider the GOB’s policy towards reservations amongst the middle stratum of the provincial bureaucracy, the ‘Subordinate Services’ or clerical cadre. Here, reservations departed considerably in both content and mission from minority interests (which, as we have seen, governed the justification for affirmative action in Bombay amongst the ‘Backward Classes’ in the ‘Inferior Services’) and religious prerogatives. For purposes of administrative efficiency Bombay Province had been subdivided into four separate commissionerships, each headed up by a Commissioner who reported back to Bombay’s Governor. The commissionership of Sindh was primarily constituted by Sindhi-speakers, and was the only Muslim-majority area within the Province. It always had a rather ambiguous relationship with the rest of Bombay, having been annexed by the British as late as 1843 and only joined with the other parts of the province in 1847. It came to be recognised as a distinct provincial unit of its own in 1935, after recurring deliberations over separation since the middle of the nineteenth century.45 The Sindh provincial government quickly looked to reorganise recruitment to its provincial services on the basis of religion, and by May 1947 70 per cent of vacancies were being allotted to Muslims, with the remainder going to non-Muslim groups.46 Meanwhile, what became known as the Northern Division was primarily made up of Gujarati-speaking regions (with the exception of Thana District), the Central Division came to be constituted by Marathi-speaking areas and the Southern Division contained an assortment of both Kannada- and Marathi-speaking districts. These four commissionerships thus broadly reflected an exclusivist understanding of the linguistic composition of the province, and lower-level provincial civil servants were rarely transferred between them. In part, this owed something to the aforementioned colonial perceptions about local forms of governance, in which local administrators were tied into their locality and the exercise of localised political power. During the Second World War, the Assistant Director of Recruiting for the Southern Area, Colonel Franks, suggested ‘that a Mamlatdar who is a Mahratta

Region, reservations and government 119 should be posted in Maharashtra and not say in the Northern Division’.47 He claimed that a particular incident within the provincial administration in Bombay, in which ‘a special educational officer who was Mahratta [was] transferred from Mahad in Kolaba District to Gujarat’ was detrimental to the functioning of the services.48 A particular perception of the local state as a site through which to prioritise the interests of local groups thus emerged, in contrast to its public presentation as a detached entity capable of impartially adjudicating social conflict. This provided the context for the contrasting policies and practices related to government recruitment in the different parts of the Indian subcontinent. Representing Muslim ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ interests Importantly, Muslims made up fewer than 8 per cent of the combined population of the Marathi- and Kannada-speaking districts of the Central and Southern Divisions, in marked contrast to Sindh.49 Muslims, as a religious minority interest, still maintained separate electorates in the provincial legislative assembly, whilst their representation remained an important aspect of the provincial machinations around bureaucratic reservations. Yet, they played second fiddle to caste considerations in the services of interwar Bombay Province, even more so after the demographic decline in their numbers upon the separation of Sindh. In response to a question from the Mysore Muslim League as to whether the Bombay Government had created any forms of special treatment for the province’s Muslims, the Political and Services Department noted that, ‘the Government has prescribed certain minimum percentages of recruitment to the Intermediate and Backward Classes as a whole and not for each and every community as such belonging to these castes’.50 Muslims were thereby expected to compete will all other ‘Intermediate’ classes for reserved appointments. Religion as a category of classification, as we have seen in the previous section too, was therefore relatively peripheral in western India in comparison to the north and at an all-India level. Rather, Muslims made up just one component part of a larger Intermediate classificatory group. Muslims in Bombay also remained standardised as a unitary and homogenised community within the ‘Intermediate’ group, despite demands for reclassification from particular sub-sections of Muslims on the lines of sect, language, class and caste.51 Indeed, the Sub-Committee of the Backward Classes Board in Bombay was to revise the schedule of Aboriginal and Hill Tribes on this account, removing the Tadvi Bhil ‘community’ from the list because they were also Muslims and were therefore considered unable to claim the concessions on offer to both ‘Intermediate’ and ‘Backward’ classes.52 Likewise, the Chhapparbands and Mianas were removed from the list of ‘Other Backward Classes’ in January 1944, after the GOB decided that they were ‘sections of the Muslim community, [and] should be treated as Muslims’.53 In yet another note dismissing a request from the Collector of Ratnagiri to reclassify the Daldis (a Muslim fishing community), as ‘Backward’, the Department argued that ‘“Caste” [was] not a feature of the Muslim community. The Muslims over the province form a solid block with a remarkable unity of purpose, ideals and interests and Government has, therefore, viewed and treated

120

Region, reservations and government

the Community as a whole’.54 As we shall see, the inability of any section of the Muslim community to avail themselves of the category of ‘Backward’ in Bombay during the years preceding independence bore remarkable similarity to their later exclusion from the term ‘backward’ under the 1950 Constitution.55 The GOB followed similar procedures to those applied to the Muslim community when considering petitions from other religious minority groups. In June 1948 the Reverend G. G. Chavke complained in a letter that ‘converts to Christianity who belong to Backward Classes have to suffer great hardships as regards employment in Government offices, because Indian Christians have been included in the Advanced Class’.56 The GOB rejected Chavke’s claim, suggesting that when an individual converted, they merged their ‘identity in the other religion and [have] no connection whatsoever with [their] original caste or community. Any attempt to allow such persons to retain their original classification is bound to lead to confusion and abuse’.57 The long history of ‘sensitivity to the nuances of caste’ within South Asian Christianity and Islam was conveniently ignored.58 Muslims and Christians in Bombay Province thus became somewhat resigned to being considered as a uniform yet marginal group within the larger ‘Intermediate’ and ‘Advanced’ class categories. Despite this, we can draw some connections between policies geared towards ensuring Muslim representation in the services in the north and the reservation scheme implemented by the Bombay Government for the Subordinate Services. But in doing so it is necessary to move away from north Indian provinces in which Muslims made up a demographic minority of the population, such as UP, and instead focus upon regions in the Indo-Gangetic plains where they constituted majorities. In the provinces of Bengal and the Punjab, Muslims formed a majority of 55.8 and 53.2 per cent of the population according to the 1931 Census.59 This slight numerical preponderance formed the backdrop to a relatively novel form of reservation in the Muslim-majority regions of northern and eastern Bengal, which, in the words of the civil servant S. N. Roy, sought to prescribe ‘representation . . . in proportion to . . . numerical strength’, rather than weakness.60 Here, community still mediated the rights of citizens to access bureaucratic jobs and reservations were still justified in the language of ‘backwardness’, but they were now conceptualised and articulated on the basis of majority Muslim interests instead.61 This owed much to local socioeconomic circumstances. Whilst the Hindu community in provinces such as Bengal and Sindh constituted a minority of the population, many of their members were drawn from trading and administrative families, and were therefore comparatively prosperous and well educated.62 Despite claims to the contrary from the Hindu Mahasabha and local advocates of Hindu rights,63 in the circumstances they were deemed by the GOI as certainly not in need of the state’s special protection.64 Non-Brahmans and bureaucratic reservations in Bombay In Bombay, Brahmans and other ‘Advanced’ classes occupied a similar position to Sindhi- and Gujarati-speaking Hindus in Sindh, situated at the top of the services hierarchy. Group-based representation was thus considered unnecessary for these

Region, reservations and government 121 small yet influential groups. Reservations in the Subordinate Services in Bombay Province, like in Bengal, Punjab and Sindh were formed on the basis of majority community interests instead. But rather than being built around religion, they were primarily constructed on the basis of local caste considerations. As we saw in the previous chapters, growing assertiveness on the part of demographically preponderate low- and intermediate-caste communities during the interwar period in Bombay often manifested itself in agitation against the likelihood of ‘Brahman Raj’ if the British were to leave India. The British colonial authorities in Bombay sought to plug-in to these concerns and divert non-Brahman political allegiances away from the Congress by creating a series of reservations in the recruitment of provincial civil servants. For appointments to the middle stratum of the provincial administration, the Subordinate Services, a variable percentage was fixed for the ‘Intermediate’ classes in the different districts of the province, which correlated with population figures and the regions in which nonBrahman agitation was at its most vociferous. In the Central and Southern Divisions of the province, made up of Marathi- and Kannada-speaking districts, the ‘Intermediate’ classes made up large proportions of the population and led their own vernacular non-Brahman movements. Here, higher percentages of government reservations were enacted for these classes. So, for example, whilst in the Southern Division (made up of both Kannada-speaking districts such as Bijapur and Dharwar, and Marathi-speaking districts such as Kolaba and Ratnagiri, as well as districts like Belgaum where sizeable groups from both communities lived), this was as high as 60 per cent (i.e. a majority of all jobs in the Division), in the Gujarati-speaking districts of Surat and Panch Mahals, as well as in Bombay City, it was only 30 per cent instead.65 Many Marathas were ideally placed to take advantage of this system of recruitment, as a numerical majority in Marathi-speaking districts who controlled the non-Brahman movement, but still ‘backward’ enough in comparison to ‘Advanced’ classes such as the Brahmans to demand reservations to improve their social wellbeing. In the case of the Subordinate Secretariat Service, for example, despite reserved ‘Intermediate’ class recruitment not being conducted on the basis of specific shares for particular communities within this category, out of 30 per cent of the 51 posts reserved for the ‘Intermediate’ classes, 27 per cent went to the Marathas. This, they suggested, ensured that, ‘On the whole it would appear the Marathas have got a fair – perhaps more than that – share in the Subordinate Secretariat Service, so far as, for instance, the 1940 recruitment was concerned’.66 This early example of a ‘creamy layer’ (i.e. the benefits of reservations going to those relatively wealthier, better educated, numerically preponderate and socially dominant groups within this category) provoked consternation amongst other ‘Intermediate’ groups (including the region’s Muslims) who found their ostensible rights to reservation circumscribed.67 The Kurubar Wool Industry Development Cooperative Association, for example, which was based at Kanebennur in Dharwar District, presented a petition to the GOB on behalf of the Kurubar/Dhangar shepherd caste that deprecated the broad composition of the ‘Intermediate’ class category. They suggested that ‘all the concessions are swept away by the advanced classes among the Intermediate and

122

Region, reservations and government

the really backward classes that deserve help are denied all help. Help does not reach the really backward classes down to Kurubars and the like’.68 Despite their claims, the GOB ultimately rejected their memorial, on the grounds that their social customs were closely affiliated with those of the Marathas. The Gabits: Backward or Intermediate? In contrast to the Kurubar petition, some Marathi-speaking non-Brahman individuals and groups looked to claim Maratha status as a means through which to better access the reservations provided for ‘Intermediate’ classes. As the very definition of Maratha was fluid (as noted in previous chapters), presenting oneself as a Maratha could serve the interests of individuals from these groups, especially in a context where local reservations were mediated on the basis of demographic rights. One specific example can be explored in detail to illustrate this point, drawing upon a sequence of petitions, discussions and resolutions regarding the status of the Gabit caste. Both colonial ethnographers and the Gabits were wont to describe themselves as Konkani Marathas, who had ‘manned the navy of Shivaji’.69 According to the Konkani Maratha Sangh, the term Gabit ‘derived from the word “Grab” a word of Arabic origin meaning a small vessel employed on sea in war. The people employed on such warships came to be known as “Grabits” which word later degenerated into the current word Gabit’.70 Gabit surnames such as Tandel, Panjari and Mheter were claimed to denote the former titles of Maratha chiefs who had developed seafaring capabilities. As a result of these perceived links, the Gabits had been associated with the Marathas for purposes of bureaucratic reservation during the 1920s and early 1930s, and continued to be termed as an ‘Allied Caste’ of the Marathas for reserved seats in the Bombay Legislative Assembly throughout this period.71 With the shift to ‘Advanced’, ‘Intermediate’ and ‘Backward’ classes for purposes of recruitment to government jobs in 1933, Gabits now came to be considered as ‘Backward’, rather than being grouped with the Marathas in the ‘Intermediate’ category. This owed much to the perception that the Gabit caste had been ‘isolated’ from the Marathas after the British conquest of Maharashtra. Their role as maritime soldiers now redundant, the Gabits had become fishermen, in which many struggled to eke out meaningful economic returns.72 Yet, at least one vocal organisation representing the Gabits was unhappy at their reclassification, and sought to be rereturned as Marathas so as to access the reservations offered to Intermediate groups. In a letter to B. G. Kher in September 1939, the Konkani Maratha Sangh argued that Gabits were now being ‘mistaken for a depressed or an aboriginal caste. Almost all people of this caste are not therefore willing to avail of the advantages granted to them as belonging to the backward caste and prefer to avail of the concessions granted to an intermediate caste’.73 Reclassification would provide the Gabits with better access to the greater opportunities afforded to the Intermediate classes in the Subordinate Services. This statement caused a great deal of excitement in British government circles, as it was seen as the ‘first of its kind’ in which a caste group had asked to be ‘upgraded’ rather than ‘downgraded’. The GOB now sought to

Region, reservations and government 123 ascertain whether the Gabits had really ‘progressed’ and could be transferred to the Intermediate class.74 Reporting back in January 1940, both the Collector of Ratnagiri and the Backward Classes Officer suggested that the Gabits had ‘advanced’ enough over the past six years to be reclassified, but that the process should be only given the go-ahead after ascertaining whether the Konkani Maratha Sangh was representative of general Gabit opinion.75 After a further round of consultation, the GOB received a new pile of correspondence over the winter and spring of 1940–1941. The Collector of Ratnagiri now performed an about face and called for the retention of the Gabits as a Backward class, after suggesting that the majority of the community wished to retain this status.76 The Gabits of Deogad Taluka also corroborated the Collector’s position in a resolution attached to the letter. Within it, they stated that they had ‘no objection to the re-classification of our community as Intermediate, provided, we are allowed to style ourselves as Konkani Marathas’.77 Yet, simultaneously, they recorded their opinion that if they were ‘not allowed . . . our community should not be re-classified as Intermediate as it will be harmful to the interest[s] of the community’.78 Similarly, the secretary of the Konkani Maratha Sangha now reneged on his earlier demand for reclassification from Backward to Intermediate, claiming he had been ‘misunderstood’ and that his request was only ‘to change the caste name from Gabit to Konkani Maratha’.79 Behind these shifting demands amongst the Gabits were attempts to gain access to a spectrum of state benefits across governmental departments. By claiming the designation ‘Konkani Maratha’, the community would be able to access free studentships in primary and secondary schools provided for Konkani Marathas by the Education Department.80 Likewise, their association with the Marathas as an ‘Allied Caste’ afforded the Gabits access to reserved seats, and therefore a slightly healthier chance of representation in the provincial legislature. By remaining classified as Backward at the same time, they would also be able to claim the bureaucratic concessions for the Inferior Services provided in government recruitment. Meanwhile, those who supported reclassification as an Intermediate class were more likely to be the relatively better educated within the community, who sought the greater likelihood of gaining jobs in the next tier of the administration within the Subordinate Services. This ‘creamy layer’ amongst the Gabits was ultimately more successful in petitioning the GOB, who eventually decided to reclassify the Gabits as Intermediate in May 1944 – in the process spawning a new set of petitions demanding a further reclassification as Backward from other members of the community.81 The flexibility in the designation ‘Maratha’ provided the context in which individuals from other Marathi-speaking non-Brahman communities were able to claim either allegiance or distance from the Marathas at any given time, in the process opening up different avenues to reservation in both the Inferior and Subordinate Services.82 Individuals and ‘allied’ communities who claimed Maratha status therefore swelled the number of those who could be considered as Marathas within the Intermediate class. As a result, even the aforementioned 27 per cent of recruitment that the Marathas monopolised within the Subordinate Services still underrepresented

124

Region, reservations and government

the near 43 per cent of the ‘Intermediate’ classes which the Marathas ostensibly constituted, and ensured that calls for their adequate representation on population grounds also continued to permeate petitions to the provincial government.83 The manner in which rights to reservations were presented therefore deviated on the basis of the particular situated perspective of the individual or community concerned. So, whereas the interests of a large proportion of Muslim, SC and other non-Brahman groups within Marathi-speaking districts of Bombay were often best served by appeals couched in the language of minority rights, in contrast a resolution passed by the Working Committee of the Ratnagiri District Maratha Association in September 1939 proposed that ‘candidates from the Maratha community should be selected always in proportion to the strength of the population of the Maratha community of this district’.84 In this telling, the representation of the Marathas in the services was therefore understood as indicative of a majoritarian form of democratic governance. The natural upshot of this idea of community entitlement based on numerical preponderance was the growing demand for the creation of a homogeneous province where majority communities could assert their authority over local institutions and state resources. Just as the Pakistan demand looked to provide Muslims with autonomy in areas where they constituted the greater part of the population, demands for linguistic reorganisation promised a greater degree of self-sovereignty for either Marathas (if defined on the basis of these loose and flexible caste-based affiliations) or Maharashtrians (on the basis of language). It was in the context of these various imaginings of independence that the Constituent Assembly of India was first convened. During the Assembly’s debates, consideration was given to what forms of affirmative action would be legislated for in postcolonial India.

The 1950 constitution, OBCs, and the Backward Classes Commission The Constituent Assembly of India, created by the Cabinet Mission plan and tasked with drafting India’s first independent constitution, first met in December 1946. However, by the time reservations in government employment were actually debated in the assembly, the ongoing events of partition and the creation of Pakistan had drastically altered the political climate and the assembly’s composition. In fact, Muslim League representation had dwindled from 73 representatives to 28, and the Congress’s share of seats rose to 82 per cent. In this context, rights to reservations were under particular scrutiny. As a number of historians have pointed out, the safeguards previously provided for ‘minorities’ were curtailed at this juncture, as the term minority came to be seen as synonymous with Muslim separatism.85 Yet, most have missed out or underplayed the fact that the recommendations implemented in their place replicated significant aspects of older policies surrounding government employment in Bombay, which had already been debated and employed during the interwar years. This section considers the linkages between the policies of the national GOI and the provincial GOB after independence in greater detail, up until the report of the Backward Classes Commission in 1955.

Region, reservations and government 125 It was in the context of partition and the creation of Pakistan that the Advisory Committee on Fundamental Rights, Minorities, and Tribal and Excluded Areas, constituted especially by the Assembly to look into these matters, considered the introduction of reserved representation in government services for a broader and more amorphous category of ‘backward classes’. This drew upon examples from Bombay. During the Constituent Assembly debates around reservations, Dr P. S. Deshmukh, a Marathi-speaking lawyer from Amravati district in Vidarbha, proposed that the preponderance of certain communities in Government service be done away with and a system of recruitment proportionate to the population of groups of backward and intermediate communities as exists for instance in the Bombay Presidency be immediately introduced.86 Likewise, K. M. Munshi, now serving as one of the key members on the Advisory Committee, initially cited the example of Bombay as an effectively functioning alternative to reservations for religious minorities, capable of encompassing the SCs and STs ‘but also other communities that were economically, educationally, and socially backward’.87 As these suggestions reveal, rather than minority entitlement, it was a group’s apparent ‘backwardness’ that now determined their access to special representation at the centre. As a result, it now became imperative to decipher what actually constituted backwardness. Central to these discussions was a larger debate about caste and class, as to which of these should form the basis of social amelioration.88 For proponents of the former, caste was a distinctive marker of stigmatisation and inferiority within (Hindu) society, and recognising it as the basis for affirmative action would serve as the best method through which to overcome its injurious effects. Affirmative action on the basis of class risked simply perpetuating the historical ascendancy of high-caste groups within the administration. In contrast, supporters of class-based reservations reversed the idea, to argue that using caste as an indicator of an individual’s backwardness would perpetuate caste stigmatisation and existing caste distinctions. An article by Kishorlal Mashruwala (a close associate of Gandhi), which was published in Harijan in August 1948, advocated that reservations in government services should be based around income thresholds instead.89 As a newly independent secular nation-state, Mashruwala and others argued, there was an added incentive to avoid inserting recognition of caste and community into the constitutional framework. Instead, economic criteria were seen to avoid treating all individuals within a particular jati in an entirely uniform manner, by also recognising and incorporating underprivileged individuals and families from upper-caste backgrounds. In fact, Mashruwala’s article provoked some civil servants within the GOB into reconsidering whether class rather than community should serve as the basis for their reservations at the provincial level. It also drew the admission that ‘The [current] system itself is not . . . free from some defects and drawbacks. . . . [I]nstances are not lacking where some families from the Advanced Classes are worse off than those belonging to the Intermediate Classes’.90 For those that advocated a rethink at the provincial level,

126

Region, reservations and government

the achievement of independence presented an opportune moment to remove a classificatory system that had the ‘undesirable characteristic of perpetuating communal distinctions’.91 Other administrators within the GOB, however, noted the inherent problems with measuring individual income. It was suggested that reservation of posts for candidates coming from families whose income did not exceed 1,000 rupees per year would not provide any substantial benefit for the SCs, and would ensure Advanced classes would secure most of the posts. It was decided, at this juncture, to postpone any further decisions on revising provincial reservation policy until the inauguration of the new constitution.92 The Constituent Assembly ultimately decided to provide some limited forms of positive preferential treatment in the administration to SCs and STs, owing to their particularly acute social and economic ‘backwardness’.93 Meanwhile, Muslims and other religious minorities had their reservations in government employment terminated. Ostensibly, then, as Tejani has argued, ‘This was not an issue of religion or caste, but of backwardness’.94 Yet, caste still remained the basis for establishing which individuals constituted these categories, and the GOB continued to use its schedules from the interwar period to identify particular castes and tribes as SCs or STs.95 It was religious minorities that lost out. The Constitution also saw the creation of the category of OBCs, but postponed any coherent decision on how this category was to be constituted. This opened the door to individuals who could not be classified as an SC or ST, but who might likewise be considered by the authorities as ‘backward’ and therefore equally deserving of special representation. As we have seen, Deshmukh and Munshi recommended the earlier affirmative action policies in Bombay for the Subordinate Services as a possible precedent for the all-India OBC category, which might likewise be composed of communities analogous to two distinct elements within the Bombay system: the OBC subsection within the Backward class; and the Intermediate classes. Yet, no decision was to be made until after the report of the Backward Classes Commission in 1955. The ambiguity and delay in defining who the OBCs actually were caused difficulties for the provincial Congress Government in Bombay when implementing the new constitutional requirements regarding reservations. At first, the government concluded that the ‘proper course’ for the Bombay Government was to follow provincial policy established in the interwar period. This entailed continuing ‘to make reservation in favour of members of the Backward Class as a whole (and not only in favour of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes)’, pending clearer parameters.96 In doing so, they equated the new all-India OBC category with their own provincial definition of OBCs as a sub-section of the Backward Class. It was only after protracted discussions with the centre on the intricate workings and ‘spirit’ of the constitution that the Bombay Government was forced to accept their view and separate SCs and STs from the ‘Backward’ Class.97 Perhaps the reason for the Bombay Government’s eventual willingness to compromise in January 1953 was that separating the SCs and STs from their larger Backward class category would ensure that they would be eligible for a series of grants that the GOI was making available for provincial governments to spend on improving the social and economic conditions of SCs and STs.98 The decision was

Region, reservations and government 127 primarily driven by practical considerations. If they continued to avoid the requirement to provide specific reservations for SCs and STs, and treated them as simply a component part of a larger category of Backward classes instead, these provisions would be inaccessible. The GOB’s ultimate reluctance to remedy its existing reservations in government employment, so as to bring them into line with the constitution’s directives, was also evident in their unwillingness to immediately cancel affirmative action policies for the Intermediate classes. In fact educational concessions, it was suggested, might be continued indefinitely. Certain caste-based communities within the Intermediate class, such as the Dhangars, Bariyas and Dharalas, were considered by the GOB to come under the remit of educationally ‘weaker sections of the people’, in the wording of Article 46 of the Constitution, which provided special protection for their educational and economic interests.99 Particular Intermediate classes were thereby re-listed as OBCs within Bombay, so as to fit within the new all-India framework. The Constituent Assembly ultimately deferred the potentially contentious decision on who comprised the OBCs to the Backward Classes Commission (BCC), which was first instituted through Article 340 of the constitution. Set up in 1953 under the chairmanship of Kakasaheb Kalelkar, the BCC was tasked with investigating the social and economic conditions of OBCs, determining the criteria for identification of such groups (either on the basis of caste or class), preparing a schedule of the OBCs in accordance with these criteria and with making recommendations as to the ameliorative measures necessary to improve their circumstances. Submitting its report in 1955, its most contentious proposal advocated a minimum percentage of reservation in government service for OBCs, which resulted in a number of the Commission’s members, including its chairman, conveying minutes of dissent, and its eventual shelving by government.100 The manner and means through which these OBCs were defined mirrored, in many interesting ways, the existing approach of the provincial government in Bombay to reservation.101 Indeed, the Commission cited the Bombay system as an influential example that would impact upon future practice in northern India and at the centre.102 In the Commission’s report, OBCs were classified on the basis of caste rather than class, in a similar manner to which at least some of the ‘Intermediate’ and ‘Backward’ classes were defined in Bombay. The decision to employ caste rather than class as the basis of demarcation was mentioned by Kalelkar as a substantial reason for his ultimate decision to dissent from the Commission’s recommendations. He argued that he was particularly conscious of ‘the dangers of suggesting remedies on caste basis when I discovered that it is going to have a most unhealthy effect on the Muslim and Christian sections of the nation’.103 This owed something to dominant assumptions about the nature of caste in the subcontinent. Caste was conceived as a fundamental constituent part of Hinduism, yet was supposedly non-existent in Islam and Christianity. In this telling, potential Muslim and Christian proselytes had been fortified in their decision to convert as a means to escape the demeaning prejudices of caste Hinduism. Yet, Kalelkar argued, by recognising caste as the basis of backwardness, ‘Muslims and Christians also . . . assert[ed]

128

Region, reservations and government

that although their religion was fundamentally different, and that theoretically it is opposed to caste, in practice their society was more or less caste-ridden’. Accordingly, ‘[t]he special concessions and privileges accorded to Hindu castes acted as a bait and bribe inciting Muslim and Christian society to revert to caste and caste prejudices’.104 The definition of ‘backwardness’ solely on the basis of caste therefore threatened to remove Muslims and Christians from the ambit of the recommendations. Kalelkar’s contention that South Asian Islam and Christianity were theoretically opposed to caste replicated older arguments that served as justification against further reservations in government employment for sub-sections of the Muslim and Christian communities in colonial Bombay.105 Yet, the reasoning and recommendations of the BCC otherwise diverged from those proffered by the GOB in the 1930s and 1940s. Whereas the GOB had ultimately treated the Muslims and Christians of Bombay Province as homogeneous blocs for the purpose of reservation, the BCC bifurcated the Muslim community by adding the names of some particularly ‘backward’ Muslim castes to the list of OBCs. Importantly, their religion was not specified in the schedule. Whilst in Bombay Muslims were listed on the basis of their religion, under the BCC those that were considered backward were listed on the basis of their caste names, which were considered common to both Hindus and Muslims: ‘Thus Teli or Julaha includes Hindu and Muslim Teli or Julaha’.106 However problematic the idea of a uniform community of Muslims in India, they were thus denied the full benefits of reservation by the BCC on a religious basis. Religious minorities who were able to assert their ‘backwardness’ also became a marginal group within the larger OBC category. The Commission created a list of 2,399 ‘backward communities’ who should be classified as OBCs and provided with greater representation in the services. This included a whole host of low-caste groups undertaking unskilled, low status and labour-intensive tasks: landowners of uneconomic holdings; agricultural and landless labourers; cattle and sheep breeders; artisans; barbers; washermen; and communities engaged in domestic and menial service. The range of occupations incorporated large peasant jatis who were numerically preponderate in their respective localities and provinces, just as the Bombay Government had allowed the Marathas to predominate with regard to reservations provided for the Intermediate class. Muslims made up just one component part of this larger Intermediate category in Bombay. Equally, they made up a similarly insignificant section of the larger OBC category in the BCC’s recommendations, and they could only lay claim to this designation on the basis of their caste status before conversion, thereby re-inscribing the demeaning and violent injustices, inequalities and prejudices from which they had sought to escape. Anupama Rao has made a similar point in the context of Ambedkar’s decision to lead a large section of his followers from the Dalit community in conversion to Buddhism in 1956. Since this seismic event, Dalit Buddhists in Maharashtra have ‘had to qualify the aims of Dalit conversion’ and have struggled to demand reservations as ‘socio-economically backward Buddhists’.107 It was only in 1972 that Maharashtra first began to treat Buddhists on a par with SCs, but this still rested on their

Region, reservations and government 129 former caste status and has since been challenged by the provincial government and courts on a number of occasions. The Ministry of Home Affairs ultimately dismissed the report because of its use of caste as the criteria to decipher backwardness: It cannot be denied that the caste system is the greatest hindrance in the way of our progress towards an egalitarian society, and the recognition of the specified castes as backward may serve to maintain and even perpetuate the existing distinctions on the basis of caste.108 And in 1961, the Ministry of Home Affairs argued in a directive to provincial governments that ‘it would be better to apply economic test than to go by caste’.109 Yet, the lack of clear guidelines from the GOI has meant that provincial governments have been free to develop their own policies towards OBCs, which have privileged both caste and class criteria. In Maharashtra, for example, the recommendations of a provincial BCC under the chairmanship of B. D. Deshmukh for caste-based reservations for SCs, STs and OBCs were implemented in 1964. In 1979, however, Maharashtra’s Chief Minister Sharad Pawar decided to reserve 46 per cent of posts for the ‘poor’ on the basis of class considerations, thereby permitting the Marathas to benefit from these forms of affirmative action, too.110 The move towards ‘universal backwardness’ also finally took hold in the north and at the all-India level, with the implementation of the recommendations of the 1980 Mandal Commission during the early 1990s.111 Even more recently, in summer 2014, the Congress-Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) coalition in Maharashtra announced its plans to introduce reservations for Marathas (16 per cent) and Muslims (5 per cent) in government jobs and educational institutions, bringing the combined total of reserved appointments in the provincial bureaucracy to 73 per cent – one of the highest percentages in the country.112 With the reincorporation of Muslims as a community worthy of reservation, policy towards the representation of communities in government employment had seemingly come full circle. Ultimately, by inscribing the centrality of caste to representation in the services, the postcolonial state reaffirmed, but also intensified in new ways, an implicit Hindu majoritarianism at the heart of government.113 During the colonial period, the reservation of one-third of permanent vacancies ‘for redress of communal inequalities’ amongst the non-Hindu population at the all-India level meant that the British Raj implied the remaining (i.e. non-reserved) two-thirds of permanent vacancies would most likely go to Hindus.114 The new emphasis upon caste in the GOI’s criteria for affirmative action in the postcolonial period meant that this form of majority rule was reimagined and extended. Non-Hindus would still have to openly compete with Hindus for representation in non-reserved government employment, whilst many were now unable to access reservations because of their supposedly ‘casteless’ status. Bureaucratic reservations introduced by the postcolonial state therefore circumscribed, in various different ways, the ability of different groups of Muslims to make claims as citizens upon the state. However, this majoritarian conception of democracy often played out rather differently in India’s

130

Region, reservations and government

various administrative arenas in an era of ‘provincialisation’, as it came to be complicated by alternative imaginaries of local or provincial community. The earlier sections of this chapter have demonstrated how majoritarianism in Bombay could be alternatively conceived on the basis of caste, particularly as representation in the Subordinate Services was prescribed in proportion to the numerical strength of the Marathas and ‘Allied Castes’ in the Marathi-speaking districts of the province. Although this still had important consequences for the representation of Muslims, as well as prefiguring some aspects of the BCC’s recommendations and the shift towards universal ‘backwardness’ in the 1990s, it was conceived primarily on the basis of an alternative, provincialised vision of what democratic rule might entail. Instead, reservations in government employment in Bombay became one part of a wider desire for a greater degree of self-sovereignty by carving out separate administrative spaces for local majorities defined primarily on the basis of caste and language, and through which postcolonial India’s geography was creatively reimagined.

Conclusion Contrasting approaches to affirmative action within the different echelons of the services in Bombay spawned a range of imaginings and experiences of democracy and citizenship. Ostensibly, merit and efficiency were at the forefront of the provincial government’s considerations when deciding upon recruitment to the highest-level Provincial Services, where no reservations were enacted. Yet, despite the rhetoric, there remained a tendency to encourage particular communities to fill such posts on account of their apparently ‘inherent’ literary and administrative acumen. This countered the ostensibly principled democratic emphasis on equality of opportunity for all. Amongst the lower levels of the provincial civil service in Bombay, meanwhile, the colonial and Congress governments looked much more openly to balance community interests on the basis of population. Justified on the basis of ethical tenets related to the state’s apparent ‘duty’ towards ‘backward’ groups, reservations were theoretically introduced to see that all communities received their ‘proper share’ of employment in the bureaucracy. And because it was with these lower and more immediate spatial representations of the state that citizens were most likely to interact, engagement with different interpretations of democratic governance were voiced at this localised level. Those individuals who sought to access bureaucratic reservations as either ‘Intermediate’ or ‘Backward’ classes dressed their appeals, petitions and memorandums in the language of particular conceptions of democratic rights and interests. Whereas some called upon the necessity for a democratic state to protect minority rights, others called for recruitment on the basis of local demographics – thus demanding that bureaucratic jobs were provided in a way that served the interests of the majority community. Provincialisation during the interwar period had vital consequences upon legislative discrepancies between the provinces and the centre, encouraging the further development of multiple and competing conceptualisations of difference. As it came to interact with ideas of democratic governance, it reinforced the political

Region, reservations and government 131 significance of community on the basis of majority and minority interests. In consequence, ideas of and claims to substantive citizenship rights came to be articulated in alternative registers in different administrative arenas. Whilst in the north and at the all-India level, religion was privileged as the primary (though not only) means through which rights to reservation were mediated, in the south and west caste was given greater prominence. In Bombay, the provincial government’s affirmative action policies were conditioned by local societal circumstances – greater representation was provided for the Intermediate classes in those divisions and districts of Bombay in which the non-Brahman movement was at its strongest. Muslims, meanwhile, treated as a homogenous bloc despite the enormous variety of people this category encompassed, were unable to avail themselves of the reservations provided by the GOB to the Backward classes. Instead, they formed a relatively small and marginalised fraction within the Intermediate category, within which Marathas were ideally placed to take advantage of the particular system of reservation provided for the Subordinate Services. Whilst some other communities classified as Intermediate complained about this inbuilt proclivity, many nonBrahman groups in Bombay, such as the Gabits, instead looked to label themselves ‘Maratha’ in an effort to enhance their access to government employment. In this context, a majoritarian notion of democracy in the Marathi-speaking districts of Bombay came to be constructed around a localised sense of community entitlement for non-Brahmans within a newly constituted space of economic belonging. This not only informed the demands for the creation of linguistic provinces in Bombay, but also replicated contemporary processes in north India that anticipated the Pakistan demand. Tracing these forms of affirmative action in interwar Bombay, in which reservations could be introduced for as much as 60 per cent of all Subordinate Services jobs, provides evidence of a longer history of majority forms of representation in government employment. This chapter has gone some way towards recontextualising the introduction of reservations for OBCs during the 1990s, but has also suggested a number of thought-provoking parallels and comparisons between the GOB’s interwar policies and those advocated by the BCC in 1955. Like the Bombay government before it, the BCC categorised who constituted an OBC on the basis of caste rather than economic considerations. As many commentators considered caste to be a fundamental part of Hinduism, yet believed it was absent from South Asia’s other religious traditions, religious minorities encountered problems when looking to access the benefits of reservation in both late colonial Bombay and early postcolonial India. Whilst this meant Bombay’s interwar Muslims were unable to access affirmative action designed for the Backward classes, but still claimed some limited dispensation at the Intermediate level, religion was now denied any form of recognition at all under the BCC’s recommendations. As a result, Muslims could only claim representation under the BCC’s categories by engaging with their (or their ancestors’) caste status before conversion. Ultimately, these policies point towards the manifestation of an implicit Hindu majoritarianism at the heart of postcolonial government, which circumscribed the ability of Muslims to make claims as citizens upon the state. These assertions were,

132

Region, reservations and government

and continue to be, synonymous with the idea of India as a single economic space, primarily constituted by Hindus. However, alternative imaginaries of local or provincial belonging in circulation at this time also cut across this dominant design and creatively reinvented India’s political geography. At least initially, for example, the Muslim League’s Pakistan demand was contemplated as one of these alternative belongings within a federal arrangement. Equally, the demand for Samyukta Maharashtra might be considered in this frame. Both of these ideas also drew upon majoritarian conceptions of democracy and exclusivist understandings of belonging and territory, but instead reimagined and applied them at the provincial and local level for Muslims and Marathas/Marathi speakers. The demands to reserve jobs on the basis of local demographics, which we have considered in this chapter, therefore served as one constituent and formative part of these alternative, regionalised expressions of belonging, which demanded the rule of the majority be applied to every institution of the state. The next chapter examines these imaginaries, as well as the consequences of their localised forms of majoritarianism upon adivasi (tribal) communities, in the context of data collection at the 1951 census in Bombay.

Notes 1 Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009, p. 7. 2 Oliver Godsmark, ‘Citizenship, Reservations and the Regional Alternative in the AllIndia Services, ca. 1928–1950’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 38 (2015), 156–170. 3 Bankey B. Misra, The Administrative History of India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1970, p. 222. 4 William Gould, ‘“The Dual State: The Unruly Subordinate”, Caste, Community and Civil Service Recruitment in North India, 1930–1955’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 20 (2007), 13–43 (p. 15). 5 MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 1673/34 XIII, ‘Letter from Sardar Rao Bahadur V.L. Thube (M.L.A.) to Governor of Bombay’, 17 September 1945. My italics. 6 Rajnarayan Chandavarkar, ‘Customs of Governance: Colonialism and Democracy in Twentieth Century India’, Modern Asian Studies [henceforth MAS], 41 (2007), p. 445. 7 MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 1624/34, ‘Communal Committees Recognised by Government up to 1 July 1938 for Recruitment Purposes’. 8 Ibid., File 1643/34 II, ‘Note of C.S. Devadhar, Backward Classes Officer’, n.d. 9 Ibid., File 1673/34 VIII, ‘Political and Services Department Note’, 10 May 1940; See also the list of example ‘Advanced’ Communities’, in ibid., File 1673/34 I, ‘Statement Showing the Percentages of Intermediate and Backward Communities’, n.d. 10 Depressed Classes and Aboriginal Tribes Committee, Report of the Depressed Classes and Aboriginal Tribes Committee, Bombay Presidency, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1930, pp. 8–9. 11 See, for example, the schedule of ‘Advanced’ classes in, MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 1673/34 I, ‘Statement Showing the Percentage of Intermediate and Backward Communities’, n.d. 12 See, for example, the list of ‘Intermediate’ classes in, ‘Imperial Table XVII: Caste, Tribe, Race or Nationality’, in A. H. Dracup and Herbert T. Sorley, Census of India, 1931, Volume VIII, Part II: Bombay Presidency, Statistical Tables, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1933, pp. 412–443.

Region, reservations and government 133 13 MSA, GOB, Reforms Office File 218, ‘Schedules of Backward Classes’, 29 May 1933. 14 MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 1673/34 IX, ‘Political and Services Department Note’, 18 November 1940. 15 Ibid. 16 Rosalind O’Hanlon, ‘The Social Worth of Scribes: Brahmin, Kayasthas and the Social Order in Early Modern India’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review [henceforth IESHR], 47 (2010), 563–595 (p. 568); Sumit Guha, ‘Serving the Barbarian to Preserve the Dharma: The Ideology and Training of a Clerical Elite in Peninsular India, c.1300–1800’, IESHR, 47 (2010), 497–525. 17 Stewart Gordon, The Marathas 1600–1818, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 185; see also, Vasudev D. Divekar, ‘The Emergence of an Indigenous Business Class in Maharashtra in the Eighteenth Century’, MAS, 16 (1982), 427–443; Laurence W. Preston, The Devs of Cincvad: A Lineage and the State in Maharashtra, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 18 Veena Naregal, Language Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere: Western India under Colonialism, London: Anthem, 2002. 19 This is not to say that the decline of direct Brahman patronage by the post-Peshwa state was not seized upon by individuals from ‘subordinate’ caste groups who sought to contest and alter the existing socio-political order. See, for example, Narendra K. Wagle, ‘A Dispute between the Pancal Devaina Sonars and the Brahmans of Pune Regarding Social Rank and Ritual Privileges: A Case Study of the British Administration of Jati Laws in Maharashtra, 1822–1825’, in Images of Maharashtra: A Regional Profile of India, ed. by Narendra K. Wagle, London: Curzon Press, 1980, pp. 129–159. 20 Quoted in Ian Copland, ‘The Maharaja of Kolhapur and the Non-Brahmin Movement, 1902–1910’, MAS, 7 (1973), 209–225 (p. 214). 21 MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 1673/34 IX, ‘Political and Services Department Note Regarding a Letter from Mohamedally Allabux on Muslim Representation in the Services’, 21 January 1941. 22 Ibid., File 1673/34 XIII, ‘Political and Services Department Note’, 23 June 1944. 23 Ibid., ‘Political and Services Department Note’, 2 August 1944. 24 Ibid., File 1643/34 II, ‘Note from K.M. Munshi, Home Minister’, 13 August 1939. 25 For a similar debate on caste or class-based considerations in the definition of ‘backwardness’ at the all-India level conducted after independence in the Constituent Assembly, the judiciary and the Backward Classes Commission, see Ornit Shani, Communalism, Caste and Hindu Nationalism: The Violence in Gujarat, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 52–63; Shabnum Tejani, Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History, 1890–1950, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008, pp. 254–257. 26 MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 1673/34 XIII, ‘Letter from a V.S. Shetti to Prime Minister and Minister in Charge of Education’, 7 December 1946. 27 Ibid., ‘Government U.O.R. to Letter from a V.S. Shetti to Prime Minister and Minister in Charge of Education’, 18 January 1947. 28 Rao, The Caste Question, pp. 4, 132. 29 Quoted in ibid., pp. 134–135. 30 Rao, The Caste Question, p. 19; see also, Cyril L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, London: Penguin, 2001 [1938]. 31 MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 1673/34 IX, ‘Political and Services Department Note on Letter from Mohamedally Allabux on Muslim Representation in the Services’, 21 January 1941. 32 Ibid., File 1673/34 X, ‘Reply to Mysore State Muslim League, Requesting Information on Fixing of Percentages of Recruitment in Government Services’, n.d. 33 New Delhi, National Archives of India [henceforth NAI], Government of India [henceforth GOI], Home Department File 1/8/49-Admn, ‘Ministry of Home Affairs Resolution’, 21 August 1947.

134

Region, reservations and government

34 Marc Galanter, Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, p. 122. 35 It is therefore reflective of the second part of V.H. Vachhrajani’s note with which this chapter began. See MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department Note 1643/34 II, ‘Political and Services Department Note by V. H. Vachhrajani’, 19 September 1938. 36 Rao, The Caste Question, p. 21. 37 Quoted in William Gould, Religion and Conflict in Modern South Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 7. 38 NAI, GOI, Home Department File 14/9/33-Ests, ‘Home Department Note’, 23 August 1933. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid., File 29/5/1/28-Ests, ‘Note of S.N. Roy’, 16 August 1929; see also, Gould, ‘“The Dual State”’, pp. 20–23. 41 NAI, GOI, Home Department File 29/5/1/28-Ests, ‘Note of J.D.V. Hodge’, 9 November 1928. 42 Milton Israel and Narendra K. Wagle, Religion and Society in Maharashtra, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987, pp. 147–148. 43 MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 1673/34 V, ‘Petition from Certain Daivadnya Caste People Residing in Kanara District’, 23 November 1938. My italics. 44 Ibid., File 1673/34 X, ‘Letter from “Ahir Sonars”’, 4 May 1942. My italics. 45 Ibid., Reforms Office File 34 II, ‘Political and Reforms Department Note, Regarding Separation of Sindh’, n.d; see also, Sarah Ansari, Life after Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh: 1947–1962, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 32–34. 46 MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 490/46 I, ‘Government of Sindh to Chief Secretary to the Government of Bombay’, 23 May 1947. 47 Ibid., File 1673/34 XIII, ‘Letter from Assistant Director of Recruiting, Southern Area, Poona, to the Home Department, Bombay’, 28 August 1944. 48 Ibid. 49 ‘Imperial Table XVII: Caste, Tribe, Race or Nationality’, in Census of India, 1931, Volume VIII, Part II: Bombay Presidency, Statistical Tables, ed. by A. H. Dracup and Herbert T. Sorley, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1933, pp. 412–443. 50 MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 1673/34 X, ‘Reply to Mysore State Muslim League’, n.d. 51 Similar demands based around notions of religious ‘minorities’ within the Muslim community emanated from the north. See Justin Jones, Shi’a Islam in Colonial India: Religion, Community and Sectarianism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; William Gould, ‘The U.P. Congress and “Hindu Unity”: Untouchables and the Minority Question in the 1930s’, MAS, 39 (2005), 845–860 (pp. 858–859). 52 MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 1673/34 IX, ‘Proceedings of the SubCommittee of the Backward Board Constituted for the Purpose of Revising the Schedules of Backward Classes as Published in G.R. G.D. No. 9930 Dated 03/12/1934’, n.d. 53 Ibid., File 1673/34 XIII, ‘Government Resolution on the Chhapparbands and Mianas’, 11 January 1944. 54 Ibid., File 1673/34 X, ‘Political and Services Department Note on Letter from S. Aminuddin, Collector of Ratnagiri, for Reclassification of Daldis as “Backward”’, 15 May 1941. 55 Tejani, Indian Secularism, pp. 255–259; Rochana Bajpai, Debating Difference: Group Rights and Liberal Democracy in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 55–57. 56 MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 490/46 II, ‘Letter from Reverend G.G. Chavke’, 26 June 1948. 57 Ibid., ‘Political and Services Department Note’, n.d.

Region, reservations and government 135 58 Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 18; see also, Susan Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society 1700–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. 59 Quoted in Gould, Religion and Conflict, p. 7. 60 NAI, GOI, Home Department File 29/5/1/28-Ests, ‘Note of S.N. Roy’, 16 August 1929. My italics. 61 For a similar point in relation to separate electorates with reserved seats in Punjab and Bengal, see Tejani, Indian Secularism, pp. 219–220. 62 Ansari, Life after Partition, pp. 33–34. 63 Tejani, Indian Secularism, p. 219. 64 See NAI, GOI, Home Department File 29/5/1/28-Ests, ‘Note of S.N. Roy’. 65 MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 1673/34 X, ‘Reply to Mysore State Muslim League’, n.d.; ibid., File 1673/34 VI, ‘Political and Services Department Note’, 20 June 1939. 66 Ibid., File 1673/34 IX, ‘Political and Services Department Note’, 26 March 1941. 67 The term ‘creamy layer’ was first introduced in the report of the Sattanathan Commission of 1971, which divided the ‘Other Backward Classes’ category created by the 1950 Constitution into two further sub-categories (the ‘backward classes’ and the ‘most backward classes’), in an effort to ensure reservations reached the most needy amongst Indian society. 68 MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 490/46 Pt. I (B Class), ‘The Kurubar Wool Industry Development Cooperative Association Ltd., Kanebennur, (Dist. Dharwar)’, 17 September 1946. My italics. 69 Reginald E. Enthoven, The Tribes and Castes of Bombay, Volume I, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1920, p. 347. 70 MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 1673/34 X, ‘Letter from Secretary, Konkani Maratha Sangh to the Hon’ble the Prime Minister, the Government of Bombay’, 20 September 1939. 71 Ibid.; see also ibid., ‘Political and Services Department Note’, 2 October 1939. For more on the ‘Allied Castes’, see Chapter 4. 72 Enthoven, The Tribes and Castes of Bombay, Volume I, p. 347. 73 MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 1673/34 X, ‘Letter from Secretary, Konkani Maratha Sangh’. 74 Ibid., ‘Note by Backward Classes Officer’, 25 October 1939. 75 Ibid., ‘Letter from Backward Classes Officer’, 3 January 1940; see also ibid., ‘Political and Services Department Note’, 20 September 1940. 76 Ibid., ‘Letter from S. Aminuddin, Collector of Ratnagiri, to the Commissioner, Southern Division, Belgaum, Subject: Classification of the Caste Called “Gabit”’, 2 February 1941. 77 Ibid., ‘Resolution of Gabits of Deogad Taluka, Ratnagiri District’, n.d. 78 Ibid. 79 Ibid., ‘Letter from Secretary, Konkani Maratha Sangh, to the Chief Secretary to Government, Political and Services Department, Bombay’, 7 December 1940. 80 Ibid., ‘Letter from S. Aminuddin’; ibid., ‘Educational Department Note’, 29 March 1941. 81 Ibid., File 1673/34 XIII, ‘Government Resolution’, 13 May 1944; ibid., File 490/46 II, ‘Letter from Gabit Hitwadi Mandal, Bombay’, 7 May 1947. 82 For some examples of individuals from other Marathi-speaking non-Brahman groups claiming affinity with the Marathas, see ibid., File 1673/34 I, ‘Statement from the Collector of East Khandesh, Jalgaon, via Kashinath Ramchandra Neve’, 21 September 1936; ibid., File 1673/34 III, ‘Letter from President, Akhil Chitode Wani Parishad, to Chief Secretary to Government of Bombay, Political and Services Department’, 26 November 1938.

136

Region, reservations and government

83 According to the 1931 Census, the ‘Mahratta and Kunbi’ caste cluster constituted 22 per cent of the entire population of Bombay Presidency, including the Princely States, and nearly 43 per cent of the ‘Intermediate’ classes. See ‘Imperial Table XVII: Caste, Tribe, Race or Nationality’, in Census of India, 1931, Volume VIII, Part II, pp. 412–443. 84 MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 1673/34 IX, ‘Copy of Resolution No. 5 Passed by the Working Committee of the Ratnagiri District Maratha Association’, 17 September 1939; See also ibid., File 1673/34 XIII, ‘Copy of a Memorial Addressed to His Excellency the Governor of Bombay, by Mr. J.S. Savant, President, Maratha Recruitment Board, Bombay’, 9 October 1944; ibid., ‘Letter from Sardar Rao Bahadur V.L. Thube (MLA) to the Governor of Bombay’, 17 September 1945. 85 Bajpai, Debating Difference, pp. 49–55; Steve I. Wilkinson, Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 102–103; Tejani, Indian Secularism, pp. 234–265. 86 NAI, GOI, Home Department File 22/2/47-Ests (S), ‘Proposal of Dr. P.S. Deshmukh’, 3 November 1947. 87 Constituent Assembly of India Debates, Volume VII, 30 November 1948, p. 697. Cited in Tejani, Indian Secularism, p. 257. 88 Shani, Communalism, Caste and Hindu Nationalism, pp. 53–59. 89 ‘Substitute for Communal Ratios’, Harijan (Ahmedabad), 12.25, 22 August 1948. 90 MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 490/46 II, ‘Political and Services Department Note’, n.d. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. 93 Galanter, Competing Equalities; Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics, pp. 268–269. 94 Tejani, Indian Secularism, p. 259. 95 MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 490/46 X, ‘Schedule List of Communities Treated as Belonging to the Backward Class in the State of Bombay’, n.d. 96 Ibid., File 490/46 IV, ‘Political and Services Department Note’, n.d. 97 Ibid., File 490/46 X-A, ‘Letter from GOI, Ministry of Home Affairs’, 20 March 1952; ibid., ‘Note of Office of R.L.A. in Response to Letter from GOI, Ministry of Home Affairs’, n.d. 98 See the file in ibid., ‘Reservation in Government Service for the Members of the Backward Class’. 99 ‘Article 46’, Constitution of India, p. 21; MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 490/46 V, ‘Political and Services Department Note’, 19 October 1950. 100 Backward Classes Commission [henceforth BCC], GOI, Report of the BCC, Volume III: Minutes of Dissent, New Delhi: GOI Press, 1956; Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs, Memorandum on the Report of the BCC, New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1956, pp. 24–25. 101 It also reflected similar policies implemented for ‘backward castes’ in southern India. See Galanter, Competing Equalities, p. 159; Sunita Parikh, The Politics of Preference: Democratic Institutions and Affirmative Action in the United States and India, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000, pp. 171, 173. 102 BCC, GOI, Report of the BCC, Volume I, p. 137. 103 ‘Forwarding Letter of Kaka Kalelkar, the Chairman, BCC to the President of India’, 30 March 1955, in Report of the BCC, Volume I, p. vi. 104 Ibid. 105 See the sub-section entitled ‘Representing Muslim “Minority” and “Majority” Interests’ in the previous section of this chapter. 106 BCC, GOI, Report of the BCC, Volume I: Main Report, p. 50. 107 Rao, The Caste Question, pp. 190–192. 108 Ministry of Home Affairs, Memorandum on the Report, p. 3; see also, Shani, Communalism, Caste and Hindu Nationalism, p. 55.

Region, reservations and government 137 109 Quoted in Shani, Communalism, Caste and Hindu Nationalism, p. 55. 110 Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India, London: Hurst and Company, 2003, p. 247. 111 Ibid., pp. 320 ff; Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics, pp. 291–305. 112 The 73 per cent reservations were to be constituted as follows: 19 per cent for OBCs; 16 per cent for Marathas; 13 per cent for SCs; 11 per cent for Nomadic Tribes; 9 per cent for STs; 5 per cent for Muslims; and 2 per cent for ‘Special Backward Classes’. See ‘Maratha, Muslim Quotas in Maharashtra’, The Telegraph (Calcutta), 26 June 2014. 113 For more on the Hindu majoritarianism of the late colonial and early postcolonial period, see Mrinalini Sinha, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006, pp. 232–247; Eleanor Newbigin, The Hindu Family and the Emergence of Modern India: Law, Citizenship and Community, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, pp. 8–9. 114 NAI, GOI, Home Department File 14/9/33-Ests, ‘Home Department Note’, 23 August 1933.

6

Classifying and counting language at the 1951 Census

Of unparalleled critical importance to the various bureaucratic reservations introduced and conducted across late colonial and early postcolonial India, and discussed in detail during the previous chapter, was the decennial all-India census. The census provided the statistics upon which these forms of affirmative action were constructed, both classifying and counting Indian society on the basis of various groupings of ‘community’ – caste, tribe, race, religion and language. However, the significance of the census to postcolonial Indian politics and society has largely been overshadowed, at least in much of the existing scholarly literature, by more thorough analytical studies of the formulation of knowledge about indigenous Indian society in the preceding colonial period. Whilst some revisionist historians have moderated the prevailing focus on colonial constructions by stressing the importance of indigenous agency in the collection of anthropological data, these works have been primarily concerned with tracing the connections, linkages and overlaps between the pre-colonial and colonial eras. Similar in-depth work on the transition between the colonial and postcolonial census has yet to meet its author. This chapter looks to rectify this lacuna by comparing the implications of data collection at the 1941 census in Bengal and Punjab, particularly ahead of an impending partition of these provinces in 1947, with the significance of the 1951 census in Bombay, before a comparable partitioning in 1960. Both of these censuses were conducted in a climate of anticipation and concern about the implications of fresh boundary demarcation. A comparative analysis of these two censuses across time and space also provides further insights into the commonalities and distinctions between partition and linguistic reorganisation, as part of a broader and more comprehensive awareness of the demands for freedom and democracy articulated during this transitional period. In both instances, the census served as a site for community mobilisation ahead of boundary demarcation: on the basis of religion in the north in 1941; and on the basis of language in Bombay in 1951. Yet, the emphasis on language for community mobilisation in Bombay simultaneously distinguishes it from the 1941 Census in Bengal and Punjab. In fact, the classification and enumeration of language has been frequently left out of both anthropological and historical scholarship on the census in India. Much more has been written on the collection of data on religion and caste at the census. This perhaps links in with a propensity towards privileging the north, as the point of theoretical analysis, within dominant historical narratives.

Classifying and counting language 139 The apparent termination of data collection on the basis of community in the postcolonial census, and its replacement with additional statistics on class and economy, might also partially account for the contrast in the amount of attention it has received in the historiography when compared with the colonial census. The new emphasis on class-based data from 1951 served as part of the new democratic state’s commitment to improving the socio-economic welfare of its citizens. However, despite the rhetoric of leading Indian politicians, this chapter demonstrates that state monitoring of its citizens on the basis of their community was not totally abandoned in the immediate postcolonial period. Demographic data on an individual’s mother tongue, for example, was still collected. The continuing collection of data on community at the census also provided greater scope for alternative ‘everyday’ initiatives on the part of local state representatives – in this case, the census officials. Theoretically, those officials charged with conducting the census were expected to ask, listen and record the information tendered in their interactions with individual members of local society in an impartial and detached manner. Yet, the 1951 Census was conducted in an atmosphere electrified by persistent demands for linguistic reorganisation in Bombay. As the telegram with which this chapter started begins to suggest, the same pressures, concerns and exigencies as the rest of the public could impact upon the impartiality of local enumerators. Census data on language could be incorrectly recorded and knowingly refashioned in the interests of the enumerator’s own community ahead of linguistic reorganisation. This chapter argues that the use of this data by the state often served to retrench the community identities it otherwise sought to challenge and uproot. In the districts that flanked the proposed border between the prospective provinces of Gujarat and Maharashtra, the effective enumeration of adivasi (tribal) languages at the 1951 Census was undermined by the ongoing contest between speakers of Gujarati and Marathi about where the exact line of demarcation was going to fall. In this context, adivasi vernaculars were deliberately incorporated within the major regional languages to gain further territorial mileage, leading to a rapid decrease in the amount of speakers of Bhili (or Dangi) in the census’s statistical returns. This, in turn, influenced state educational policy in these districts. Drawing upon discourses of ‘backwardness’ and ‘uplift’ formulated in the interwar period, which suggested the welfare of low-caste and tribal communities would be improved by replicating the superior habits of their social superiors, adivasi children were now to be educated in Gujarati or Marathi, rather than their own mother tongue. As a result, the democratic state’s theoretical commitment to equal socio-economic welfare for all, regardless of community affiliation, was undermined. The chapter first considers the existing historiography on the census in greater depth, demonstrating its relative lack of attention towards both language and the postcolonial census. The next section moves on to consider the discrepancies between governmental rhetoric that the census would now focus upon economic rather than community data, and the continuing collection of statistical returns on language (as well as for ‘Scheduled Castes’ (SCs) and ‘Scheduled Tribes’ (STs)). As such, this still provided the potential for the political manipulation of the data. Third, the chapter fleshes out the ways in which the local practices of census enumerators could potentially depart from the notion of state impartiality in communal

140

Classifying and counting language

matters, whilst noting the petitions and memorials of those who countered these instances of local state malpractice by emphasising its hyperbolical principles. The final two sections consider the position of the region’s adivasi population amidst efforts to define their linguistic allegiance ahead of boundary demarcation and in the context of the aforementioned attempts at adivasi ‘uplift’.

Situating the postcolonial census in Bombay The decennial all-India Census, inaugurated across the entire subcontinent for the first time in 1871, and completed with great rigmarole every ten years since, was considered essential to the formulation of state knowledge about indigenous society in colonial India.1 For Ronald Inden, writing in 1990, the census was the epitome of the colonial project to classify and count Indian ‘communities’, an ‘imagined India’ of false projections based around Orientalist stereotypes.2 The writings of Arjun Appadurai, Bernard Cohn and Nicholas Dirks have since modified and introduced important caveats within this approach. Yet, for these anthropological historians, ‘the empirical project of the census [remains] wedded to the most general of Orientalist categories for the classification of the social order, with built-in assumptions about hierarchy and precedence’.3 The census thus perpetuated colonial misunderstandings that Indian society was ordered primarily around religion: both the supposedly primordial communal division that existed between Hindus and Muslims; and the ranked and stratified nature of Hindu society based around a caste ‘system’, with Brahmans existing at the apex of this hierarchy. In this historiography, modern Indian political identities are often seen to derive from these colonial processes: ‘[Herbert Hope] Risley’s anthropology worked not so much to retard nationalism as to render it communal. In so doing, it also left a bloody legacy for South Asia that continues to exact a mounting toll’.4 For Sumit Guha, Norbert Peabody and others, this approach has glossed over administrative continuities from the pre-colonial era, whereby the Mughals and their successors conducted enumerative practices as they sought to acquire knowledge about the local societies they governed.5 It has also obscured the extent to which the formation of pre-colonial community identities was always political, as individuals, groups and communities engaged with the state’s prescriptions and structures to protect their own interests and concerns. And this Eurocentric approach has paid relatively scant attention to the consistent fluctuations and transformation in the formulation of colonial knowledge during this period, as highlighted perhaps most effectively in the work of Susan Bayly.6 Bayly concurs with Dirks and others that many late nineteenth-century colonial ethnographers, such as W. W. Hunter and H. H. Risley, were influenced by a wider intellectual climate in which race science in the metropolis and overseas empire became increasingly pervasive.7 In this interpretation, different jatis constituted separate ‘races’. Paradoxically however, others such as Denzil Ibbetson, were drawn towards a ‘material’ or ‘occupational’ understanding of caste, which placed stress upon its relative fluidity and openness. The emphasis on ethnicity and blood, emerging partially from ideas about a stratified hierarchy of Brahmanical values within a caste

Classifying and counting language 141 ‘system’, was deemed by Bayly as not as all pervasive amongst the administrators as historians have initially argued. Part of the reasoning behind this relates to the particular spatial location of these administrators. Whilst Ibbetson developed his ‘material’ interpretation within the Punjab, Hunter and Risley’s formulations emerged out of the specific locale of Bengal. And this suggests the need to attach adequate importance to local Indian societies in the formulation of colonial knowledge. As Peabody has argued, much previous research has oft tended ‘to situate the genesis of colonial ways of knowing as being entirely within the European episteme’, ensuring that ‘the role of indigenous actors, agendas and ways of knowing in the construction of these discourses has been systematically ignored’.8 Whilst tracing both the changes and continuities between the pre-colonial and colonial periods has rectified much of this, the continuing efficacy of the census has not yet been thoroughly considered in the context of Indians’ gradual transition from colonial subjecthood to democratic citizenship. This chapter seeks to reorient this already nuanced and developed scholarship by stressing the continued importance of the local indigenous intermediary in everyday classificatory and enumerative processes attached to the collection of data in postcolonial India. Within the context of the census, and the vast levels of illiteracy amongst the native populace, it was decided that ‘in India we cannot work on the Western system, whereby each householder has a schedule handed him to fill up, and that schedule is simply collected’.9 Instead, indigenous enumerators and supervisors employed by the state were critical to the collection of vast amounts of local data, and in effectively relaying it back to the appropriate authorities. However, conducting the census was also always simultaneously a political process, with important consequences for the potential representation of communities both within the electoral arena and the structures of the bureaucracy. Hence, the indigenous intermediary also occupied a position of important political interest, in which the manipulation of statistics could potentially benefit particular factions, groups and ‘communities’. Drawn from amongst local society themselves, these enumerators were subject to the same pressures and concerns as ordinary members of the public, and could be pressurised, cajoled and influenced by particular interest groups and locally important individuals.10 In these circumstances, the supposed ‘impartiality’ of the enumerator in the collection of data was upset in practice, as they became enmeshed within networks of patronage, placed emphasis upon their particular social identities and interpreted the statistics in light of their own interests and concerns. Most Indians’ actual engagement with the state at the census was in these more informal, on the ground (and oft one-sided) negotiations with local state representatives. These everyday interactions around the census are of especial importance, particularly when considering the larger historical processes that were linked to the gradual transition from authoritarian colonial rule to liberal democracy, and served to entrench the importance of community identities. In 1941, for example, in an environment saturated by religio-political mobilisation in northeast and northwest India after the Lahore Resolution of the previous year ‘census operations became

142

Classifying and counting language

a much more direct fight between advocates of Hindu and Muslim enumeration’.11 Half a decade later, these statistics were then utilised by indigenous politicians to augment their claims to particular tracts of territory in the context of plans for the partition of Punjab and Bengal. Whilst Hindu nationalist organisations scrambled to demonstrate the analogous religious and cultural identities of tribal and lowcaste groups residing in these areas, Muslim political organisations looked to foster depictions of the cultural distinctiveness and ‘minority’ rights of adivasis to reduce the numerical strength of the Hindus. These low-caste and tribal groups were frequently caught in the religio-political crossfire, and their own interests and concerns overridden and nullified when drawn into these larger, national political debates.12 Throughout this process, the collection and classification of religious data by enumerators was thus of immense importance for a variety of communitybased interests – and in fact, they helped shape the final position of the new nationstates’ territorial boundaries. Similarly, the collection and classification of data on community at the census of 1951 was potentially critical to those who claimed particular tracts of territory in the context of linguistic reorganisation. The importance of the demands for the linguistic reorganisation of provincial administrative boundaries in this period provided the context for much of the machinations, petitions and representations around the census during 1951. The efficacy of linguistic demographics within the census has often been largely ignored in the existing historiography, particularly because of the emphasis upon caste and religion as the key elements in colonial definitions of Indian society.13 Because, as David Washbrook has noted, histories of ‘the whole’ have invariably been ‘not much more than histories of Bengal and the Ganges valley’, the importance of the collection and classification of data on language has generally been downplayed.14 With the enumeration of caste being almost entirely abolished in 1951 and replaced with a new stress on socio-economic classifications, the continuing political efficacy of community in the Nehruvian period has also been generally overlooked. But by refocusing our perspective on the wider implications of the anticipation and aftermath of independence and partition, in which multiple ideas about both democracy and swaraj (including the Pakistan demand) were often expressed through a regional idiom, we can trace the importance of the 1951 census afresh. In doing so, the remainder of this chapter will focus on a number of particularly important areas in Bombay Province in the context of demands for linguistic reorganisation and the census of 1951. First, the taking of the census in the southern districts of Belgaum and Sholapur, where particular tracts of territory within this district were to be contested by proponents of the unilingual provinces of Maharashtra and Karnataka, proved particularly controversial. Although statistics on the linguistic composition of these districts have to be treated with the utmost caution considering their manipulation by local census officials, it is apparent that Belgaum District was a Kannada-speaking ‘majority’ area, with a sizeable Marathispeaking ‘minority’ residing in the north and west of the district and in the district’s administrative headquarters, Belgaum City. Sholapur, meanwhile, was primarily a Marathi-speaking area, with a notable Kannada-speaking ‘minority’ in Sholapur

Classifying and counting language 143 city and the South Sholapur Taluka.15 The record of the ethno-linguistic affinities of villages, towns and cities were thus deemed critical to the delineation of provincial boundaries. Second, the local performance of the census, primarily in the Dangs District, but also in Thana and West Khandesh, served as sites of tension between supporters of either a unilingual Gujarat or a unilingual Maharashtra. These districts had large adivasi populations, whose ethno-linguistic allegiances were the subject of much controversy in 1951. Adivasis made up 21.91 per cent of the population in Thana District; 39.42 per cent of the population in West Khandesh; and as much as 84.35 per cent of the population in the Dangs.16 In a similar manner to how low-caste and adivasi populations in Bengal were treated ahead of the 1941 census by proponents of Hindu and Muslim politics, the supporters of Maharashtra and Gujarat in Bombay Province sought to affiliate the adivasi populations of western India with their own linguistic community. In the Dangs, where the adivasi population were said to speak a local vernacular known as ‘Bhili’ or ‘Dangi’, conflict between Maharashtrians and Gujaratis as to whether Dangi derived from either Marathi or Gujarati led to a subsequently rapid decline in the number of respondents returning Dangi as their mother tongue in the census. Linguistic diversity, it seems, was to be replaced by an emphasis upon monolinguism within the newly demarcated provinces. This chapter therefore seeks to enhance existing scholarship on the census in India in two ways. First, it concentrates upon the everyday enumerative and classificatory practices of indigenous intermediaries, who proved essential to the larger processes related to the gathering of state knowledge, and who frequently became embroiled within the political consequences of data collection. Second, it focuses afresh on linguistic demographics in the context of regionalism and growing demands for linguistic reorganisation, which has been relatively overshadowed in previous studies by the focus upon caste and religion as the key categories and identities of social analysis by the state. It thus stresses both continuities and changes in the gradual transition from colonialism to independent nationhood – so whilst the classification and enumeration of mother tongue was provided with a relatively novel importance in the aftermath of independence and partition, in which it became tied up with ideals related to forms of local self-government, the census also continued to reflect older colonial models and practices. Even though caste was no longer counted and emphasis was put upon socio-economic classifications, individuals continued to express their interests and rights through the idiom of community.

From ‘community’ to ‘class’? On 7 February 1951, the Chief Minister of Bombay B. G. Kher sent an ‘Appeal’ to the public ahead of the first day of enumeration for the ninth all-India census. According to Kher, ‘A modern State, interested in the welfare of its people, cannot function efficiently and succeed in its objectives unless it has at its disposal accurate information about the number of people under its care and their socio-economic

144

Classifying and counting language

conditions’.17 Hence, despite the advent of independence and the end of British colonial rule, a census was still seen as a necessity by the postcolonial administration to augment state knowledge of, and state power over, society. For Kher it was deemed a ‘duty’ incumbent upon all citizens to oblige in the census operation, and not to ‘look upon the enumerator as someone who has come at his door to irritate and annoy him by requiring him to answer questions regarding himself and the members of his family’.18 In this interpretation citizenship within India was to be defined as much by Indians’ responsibilities towards the state as the rights they had been guaranteed under the constitution of the previous year. The new emphases on secularism, democracy and welfare in Nehruvian India were also implicit in Kher’s appeal. He went on to suggest that, ‘The objectives of the present Census are particularly more broad [sic] based than those of the previous Census operations. The emphasis has now shifted from religion and caste to economic classification’.19 Supposedly departing significantly from colonial perceptions of Indian society as based on two primordially irreconcilable religious communities, and a stratified and hierarchical Hinduism, the 1951 Census appeared as the culmination of Congress nationalists’ efforts to have the collection of caste and religious statistical information abolished from the data record. However, despite this post-independence de-emphasis on the enumeration and compilation of information regarding communities, ‘the Census authorities still made much of caste in their subsidiary descriptive reports’.20 A separate chapter of the census continued to tabulate data and offer analytical remarks on the Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs) and Other Backward Classes (OBCs), which was deemed critical in light of the special privileges granted to these communities under the constitution.21 Meanwhile, statistical returns regarding language were still collected, and continued to thereby reflect older patterns whereby language was equated with ethnicity. With regards to western India, for example, the 1901 Census had conflated caste, language, territory and nationhood, by suggesting that the designation ‘Maratha’ could be applied to a distinct territorial region, all Marathi speakers, or to cultivating non-Brahman castes.22 Ethno-linguistic affinities were also considered critical ahead of reorganisation. Like this example drawn from the colonial census, the postcolonial census continued to entrench the importance of community identity, and thereby retained political significance. Indeed, by 1954, ‘the Government of India [had] decided to obtain language data according to villages for all multilingual talukas [‘sub-district’ levels of administration] in India by means of a special sorting of the 1951 census slips’.23 Despite the rhetorical flourish which accompanied the achievement of independence and the emphasis on secularism, democracy and welfare, the suggestion that ‘the basis of classification was economic and not social’ during the 1951 Census therefore proved at least a partial chimera.24 The Government of India’s 1954 directive had coincided with the nationwide tour of representatives of the States Reorganisation Commission, who had been tasked with deciding whether India’s provinces should be reorganised on the basis of linguistic, cultural, financial and security considerations. Meanwhile, the SRC’s final proposals of 1955 were announced in the same year as these new ‘Language

Classifying and counting language 145 Handbooks’ were first published. In this way, the counting of heads on the basis of community echoed at least one of the criteria that had been put forward to Sir Cyril Radcliffe, as well as the Bengal and Punjab Boundary Commissions, tasked with delineating the two new nation-states of India and Pakistan in 1947. Muslim League claims within the Punjab, for example, rested upon demography: ‘Muslims must, they argued, be given all the districts in Lahore Division, Rawalpindi Division and Multan Division, which according to the 1941 census were all Muslim-majority districts, majority determined simply by “counting of heads and by no other means”’.25 The later emphasis upon communal demography during the 1951 Census ahead of linguistic reorganisation reflected these older precedents set by previous enumerative practices, which were in turn intimately connected to the demarcation of Pakistan. And in this sense, both the 1941 and 1951 censuses played a critical role within the much broader trend towards regional mobilisation and sub-national autonomy embodied within both the Pakistan demand and linguistic reorganisation. Societal and governmental references to the census continued to be critical to settling community disputes beyond independence and partition. The Maharashtra Ekikaran Samiti (Maharashtra Unification Committee) of the disputed city and district of Belgaum, for instance, made reference to population figures on the basis of mother tongue within the 1951 Census to argue that Belgaum was a Marathi majority city.26 And as we shall see in the Dangs District, both Gujarati and Maharashtrian claimants to the region sought to manipulate census figures in their favour to ascertain that the district’s adivasi population were ethnically akin to Gujarati or Marathi speakers. Of course, the importance of mother tongue within the census had been articulated in the past, most notably in reference to the ‘Telugu-Oriya question’ and the religio-political connotations attached to the profession of Hindi, Urdu or Hindustani as mother-tongue ahead of the 1931 Census.27 It had also proved increasingly significant within Bombay Province in the context of the increased welfare activities of indigenous governments under dyarchy and full provincial autonomy. But language had always been deemed relatively insignificant when compared to the colonial emphasis upon caste and religion. However, by 1951 the political context had changed significantly. The need to demarcate the boundaries of potential new provinces on the basis of the district, town or village’s linguistic demographics, and the desire to access the possible political and social benefits which would accrue to those who found themselves included within a demographic ‘majority’ defined on the basis of community, ensured that the census increasingly became a sight of contestation along the lines of language.

Local census enumerators and trans-local state principles Behind the increased efficacy of linguistic identities were those enumerators and checkers who played a critical role in the everyday procedures which underpinned the effective operation of the all-India census. Tellingly, Chief Minister B. G. Kher was to refer to them as ‘an agency through which a Census is taken’.28 These intermediaries therefore occupied an important position between state and society,

146

Classifying and counting language

representing the state’s authority to the wider Indian public. But their privileged location also allowed them to mediate the state’s power and its formulation of knowledge, often seeking political, social and material advantage in the process for themselves, their particular faction, alliance or in the case of this chapter, their community. In the context of the census, for example, the recognition that continued to be afforded to the counting of mother tongues came to be manipulated by these intermediaries in favour of particular communities, ahead of the boundary demarcation that would accompany reorganisation. In fact, complaints regarding the conduct of enumerators or their supervisors in the recording of their respondents’ mother tongue became increasingly commonplace in 1951. Towards the end of February, for example, after enumeration had been going on for just over two weeks, the Government of Bombay received a letter from two inhabitants of Sholapur, another district which contained sizeable populations of both Kannada and Marathi speakers. The lawyer M. S. Sirdar and the politician N. B. Kadadi accused Sholapur City’s enumerators of being involved in special efforts to influence the returns regarding their respondents’ mother tongue. According to Sirdar and Kadadi, the enumerators do not ask specific question as to the mother tongue of the person enumerated and . . . consequently the mother-tongue of Kannadigas is entered as “MARATHI” simply because the person enumerated knows how to speak Marathi and begins to speak in Marathi when the enumerator goes to him or her as the case may be.29 Part of the problem, Sirdar and Kadadi speculated, was that 90 per cent of Sholapur’s enumerators were themselves Marathi speakers, who intentionally avoided asking this relatively unambiguous question. Similar concerns were raised in Belgaum City by an organisation formed especially for the purpose, the Census Committee of the Kannada Population at Belgaum. In a letter to J. B. Bowman, the Superintendent of Census Operations in Bombay, they claimed to ‘have heard of instances where questions are asked not as to language spoken by people as their mother-tongue but as to whether they understand Marathi’.30 On one level, these representations and petitions to higher authorities served to highlight the contrasting everyday interests of these Kannada-speaking communities to the census officials taken from amongst the local Maharashtrian public, with the former often seeking to have members of their own linguistic group substituted in the place of the latter. In the context of boundary demarcation, the opportunity to control the classificatory and enumerative process within the census was a valuable prize, potentially ensuring that their community would be classified and grouped within a larger Kannada-speaking community and able to access the benefits that came with constituting a democratic ‘majority’. The Census Committee at Belgaum noted this very fact when they suggested that, ‘The data . . . will have far reaching consequences, and may even be used for . . . settling the boundaries of new provinces or states that are likely to be formed during the next decade’.31 It was therefore not in their best interests that out of the 74 proposed enumerators, they

Classifying and counting language 147 claimed, 69 of them were Marathi speakers and only one spoke Kannada (the remaining four were said to speak Urdu). With regard to their seven supervisors, too, five were said to be Marathi speakers, and only two Kannadigas. On another level, however, these appeals by Kannada speakers could and often did make reference to the ideologies and ideals upon which the state was ostensibly predicated, grasping the utility of its supposedly ‘sublime’ impartial nature to deprecate Marathi enumerators.32 In appealing over local state representatives to higher administrative authorities at the provincial level, they emphasised the official state discourse of an inclusive citizenship where parochial loyalties were not welcome. The Census Committee at Belgaum, for instance, argued during the collection of data that ‘there ought to be employed a system of checks by which vagaries and inconsistencies, are corrected by officers of unimpeachable integrity’.33 In this way, they echoed the central government’s emphasis on the impartiality and national duty of enumerators, as an essential characteristic of the postcolonial state. This also proved essential to criticisms of current enumerative procedures. In Belgaum, where they had been entrusted to the city’s municipal council, the Census Committee argued the council was itself not free ‘from bias or preconceived notions’.34 Only two years previous, for example, just after the Linguistic Provinces Commission had submitted its report suggesting it was an inopportune moment for provincial reorganisation, the Belgaum Municipality had passed a resolution which favoured inclusion of Belgaum in a future Maharashtra Province. This was deemed to impinge upon the ability of the municipal council to conduct the 1951 census in the city with due detachedness and objectivity. Meanwhile, others sought to place emphasis upon national identity and Indian unity above other forms of community organisation, reflecting and redirecting the criticism of demands for provincial reorganisation as ‘fissiparous’ and ‘separatist’ that emanated from central government. The mamlatdar (a civil servant in charge of a taluka) of Athani in Belgaum District claimed to have appealed to the ‘importance of census operations from a national point of view’ during a public meeting, when he had tried to impress upon the local inhabitants the need to furnish accurate information to their enumerators.35 Yet, the mamlatdar also revealed that he had developed a local system of checks and balances, which was based around the idea that, ‘The enumerator of each block is a person whose mother tongue is either Kannada or Urdu and the checker of each block is a teacher in [the] Marathi school’.36 The idea to divide local enumerators and supervisors on the basis of their community also received the backing, at various stages, of S. Nijalingappa, President of the Karnatak Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC), B. S. Hiray, President of the Maharashtra PCC, and Morarji Desai, who at the time was the Home Minister in Bombay’s Congress Government.37 In Belgaum meanwhile, a directive was issued by the District Collector to the President of Belgaum Borough Municipality in the context of fears over the local enumerative procedure, ‘to increase the number of enumerators knowing Kannada to make it approximately 50 per cent with a view to doing justice to both the languages’.38 Attempts to parcel out posts to enumerators on the basis of community had some longer precedents, again

148

Classifying and counting language

related to the context of an impending partition. Ahead of the 1941 Census in Bengal, for example, the provincial Revenue Minister B. P. Roy had suggested that Hindu and Muslim enumerators should be paired together in view of continuing communal rivalry, to supervise each other’s work and ensure that the records were not falsified.39 Yet, the idea provoked a long and critical response from the all-India Census Commissioner M.W.M. Yeatts, who insisted it was essential that all census officers should be detached from any kind of partisan activity or assistance. To conduct a census in the manner suggested by Roy, ‘would be to make the entire province during the census period a kind of battlefield’.40 In 1951, too, the decision to employ enumerators on the basis of the ‘linguistic divide’ in contentious borderline villages, towns and districts, whilst presented as a form of secularism, was not based upon the ‘separation of church and state’. Rather, it might be seen to serve as an example of ‘equal respect for all traditions’, as a distinctive form of Indian secularism, with important consequences that correlated with Yeatts’ critique of 1941.41 The census official’s reasonableness, detachedness and disinterestedness in local enumerative practices, a proper separation of the state and communal society through which objectivity could be provided, was thereby affected by the local procedures involved with the collection and classification of data. The census still survived as a site of communal political interest, a place for contestation between different communities. In fact, the networks of communal recognition contained within these classificatory and enumerative procedure – the decision to continue collecting data on mother tongue; the concept of communal checks and balances amongst enumerators; the very need for local knowledge to ensure the census was completed – ensured that ‘pressure could [still] be applied to favour one’s community’ in the census returns.42

Ethnicity, majority and democracy at the census Local census procedures and enumerative intermediaries therefore played a critical role in explaining why the advent of liberal democracy in postcolonial India, based around the individual rights-bearing citizen, simultaneously entrenched the importance of community identity for individuals’ interactions with the state. At the same time, community also became linked to ethnicity, as part of a broader strategy to emphasise indigeneity in the context of the census and linguistic reorganisation. And references to community and ethnicity also engaged with the discourse of majority and minority rights, as part of a wider reflection on the meaning and practice of democracy in an increasingly representative India. The census was critical here, as it was the instrument tasked with quantifying whether a community constituted a majority or minority in a particular town, district or province. ‘A Note Regarding the Boundaries of North Karnatak’ prepared by the Collector of Belgaum and submitted to the Linguistic Provinces Commission in 1948, for example, included tabulated information on linguistic demographics from the 1921 and 1931 Censuses. In the ‘Note’, the Collector argued that this table shows uniform retrogression of Kannada in all Deccan States, except one or two solitary instances. What does this signify? In the absence of migration on

Classifying and counting language 149 the part of Kannada speaking people or the sudden influx of Marathi speaking population or the fall of birth rate in the case of Kannadigas, one is led to the irresistible conclusion that pro-Marathi enumerators deliberately showed Kannada as less in the census returns.43 The emphasis on the partiality of the enumerators in 1921 and 1931 reflects similar concerns amongst Kannada-speaking inhabitants of Sholapur and Belgaum highlighted in the previous section of this chapter. However, the Collector then went on to link the contemporary manipulation of census data to a longer ‘clash of civilisations’, which had resulted in the historical dominance of Marathi speakers over the Kannadigas, who were the ‘original’ inhabitants of the land in North Karnatak. A direct influence here was the previous depictions of Marathas as a ‘nation’ or ‘race’ apart in the classificatory categories of past colonial censuses.44 But the Collector’s reasoning also reflected similar thinking connected to the 1941 Census in the context of the Pakistan demand, where religious community had become increasingly associated with ethnicity.45 The Collector’s ‘Note’ argued that these ‘Boundaries of North Karnatak’ had come to be ‘misdescribed’ as the ‘Southern Maratha Country’ because of the Maharashtrian ethnicity of the native princes of such territories as Kolhapur, Kurundwad, Miraj and Sangli: the Kanarese people have been displaced, to a certain extent, by the Marathi people and language in the Native States, only because these States were established by the aggressions of Marathas from the north whose local influence proved to be greater than that of the native rulers whom they dispossessed.46 In this interpretation, conquering Marathi-speaking ‘outsiders’ from the north, in what seems a direct transposition of the Aryan invasion thesis to the Collector’s contemporary context, had thus displaced the influence of the Kannada-speaking natives. Accordingly, the Kannada language had declined in significance ever since the Maratha principalities of Kolhapur and Satara had been formed at the beginning of the eighteenth century, whilst the importance of Marathi had grown exponentially since the death of Aurangzeb and the decline of Mughal influence. Others invoked an even longer history of Kannada subjugation. In October 1936, for example, a letter entitled ‘The Unification of Karnatak: A Moral Necessity’ and published in the Bombay Chronicle, proclaimed that, Under Mahomedan rule the Kanarese language suffered not due to the Urdu or Persian tongue of the rulers but due to the Marathi-language of the Maratha Sardars serving under the Mahomedan Kings. Then the Maratha rule and the Marathi language held the field for a century and a half. The net-result of the non-Kannada rule was that the Kannada people began to feel like strangers in their own land.47 The letter went on to argue that it was the continued ‘tyranny of [Marathi-speaking] minorities’ under the British Raj that had put paid to efforts to create a

150

Classifying and counting language

Karnatakan homeland, as they frequently saw in the demands for Kannadaspeaking rights ‘an attack on their [own] rights and begin to raise a row’.48 In doing so, the letter engaged with the democratic language of ‘majority’ and ‘minority’, as a means through which to imagine community in political forms. But the letter also expanded this repertoire of rights claims by situating its demands within a particular socio-historical context of inequality and exploitation, relating to language rather than caste and religion. In this case, it is Marathi speakers who are described as a minority in North Karnatak, rather than Muslims and ‘untouchables’, who are normally treated as the archetype. Yet, the state’s commitment to a form of commensuration, which provided minority communities with special rights and dispensations, is here described pointedly as a ‘tyranny’ that needed to be ‘extirpated for the good of the [Karnatak] province as well as the whole nation’.49 Instead, Kannada speakers within the districts of North Karnatak required the creation of an autonomous Kannada-speaking province to experience true democracy, protecting their rights as a distinctive community in a province where they constituted the majority of the population. In this telling, the association of freedom with democracy meant majoritarian rule, as something distinct from wider societal equality. A similar incentive seemed to underwrite enumerative practices in Sholapur City during the 1951 Census. The 1955 ‘Language Handbook’ for Sholapur, Satara South, Bijapur and Kolhapur Districts which, as we have seen, sought to re-work the 1951 Census figures for mother tongue at the level of the village and town, ‘disclosed a rather disquieting discrepancy’ in this regard. The proportion of Marathi speakers in Sholapur dropped from 47.1 to 38.9 per cent, Kannada speakers likewise dropped from 14.8 to 12.8 per cent, and speakers of Telugu, Urdu and other languages saw their percentages rise as a result of this ‘re-sort’.50 The cause of the error remained unknown, but it does suggest some truth in Sirdar and Kadadi’s earlier claims about enumerative bias. It seems that those minorities in Sholapur outside of the two largest linguistic communities saw their position squeezed as a result of the battle between Kannada and Marathi speakers over the city’s allegiance. The advent of democratic rule and independence, in this view, was to complement the ideal of ‘self-government’ by the local majority in a new unitary linguistic province. This conceptualisation of greater rights and status for those who constituted a locally dominant or majority community was perhaps most emphatically stated by K. G. Gokhale, the Kannada-speaking representative for Belgaum South in the BLA. For Gokhale, pandering towards minority interests was incompatible with his own notion of democracy, which meant ‘majority rule’. Responding to B. R. Ambedkar’s efforts to have the debate on the formation of Karnataka abandoned in 1938, on the basis of the potential problems it would create for minority communities, Gokhale asserted that, If Dr. Ambedkar has any faith in democracy and if democracy means rule of the majority, then minorities must honourably, whole-heartedly, sympathetically and heartily accept that particular rule, by applying their own honest efforts to the building up of that particular nation. . . . I [for one] will place all that belongs to me at the feet of the Karnatak Mata [mother].51

Classifying and counting language 151 This, notably, would allow the Kannada speakers to control the province, to finally be able to access the rights that they deemed they deserved as both the original and the majority inhabitants of the region. Ethnicity as the crucial criterion behind access to rights and status within newly constituted provinces could also inform the opinions of Marathi speakers on reorganisation too. D. M. Kulkarni, a Marathispeaking lawyer from Karwar in North Kanara District, for example, speculated that it would be ‘unjust and unfair on the part of Government to impose upon [the people of Karwar taluka] a language like Kannad which is in no way allied to their own Marathi language, the former being of Dravidian stock and the latter of Aryan stock’.52 Increasingly, then, an ethnicised and majoritarian interpretation of democracy informed much of the local procedures related to boundary demarcation, including the role of census officials in the collection of data on mother tongue. As we have seen, enumerators played a critical role in these definitions of democracy, as they mediated and represented the authority of the state for many citizens who would otherwise never develop close contacts with officialdom. They also sought to redirect enumerative and classificatory procedures, looking to manipulate them in their own interests and those of their community. But they were able to do so because everyday enumerative processes still recognised the importance of communal allegiance to ensure the smooth running and completion of the census as a whole. Ostensible commitments to equality, welfare and secularism, which were voiced in the census by an emphasis upon economic rather than communal classifications, as well as the state’s supposed impartiality, existed alongside continued efforts to collect data on linguistic groups and STs and SCs, the parcelling out of enumerative posts on the basis of community, and the trust afforded to local knowledge in the formulation of wider state information. Despite central government rhetoric which suggested minorities would be protected by guarantees enshrouded within the constitution, the need to demarcate provincial administrative boundaries on linguistic lines ensured that ethno-linguistic affinities were essential to notions of democracy and equality at the local, everyday level. And this, as we have seen and shall consider in more detail in the next section, could have an important impact upon the social and cultural existence of minority communities within Bombay.

Adivasi ‘uplift’, religion and language In similar circumstances to disputes amongst Marathi and Kannada speakers, the exact site of the line of demarcation between the proposed states of Gujarat and Maharashtra became a point of contention in the northern districts of Dangs, Thana and West Khandesh, too. The development of democratic majoritarianism, which often dwelt upon ethno-linguistic affinities as symptomatic of an individual’s belonging and status, were therefore also to impact upon those whose mother tongue fell outside the ambit of the three primary languages (Gujarati, Kannada and Marathi) of the province. During the late 1940s and 1950s, disagreements broke out over the classification of the mother tongue of these districts’ adivasi populations. In fact, after the cities of Bombay and Belgaum, the controversy over

152

Classifying and counting language

the Dangs became the next largest point of contention regarding linguistic reorganisation in the whole of western India. At the 1951 census, the enumeration and classification of the adivasis’ language was therefore of critical significance. The introduction of larger state processes to establish unambiguous data and the more local (and sometimes inadvertent) manipulation of statistics by local enumerators ahead of linguistic reorganisation privileged standardised, official languages at the expense of local tribal vernaculars. Everyday enumerative practices and procedures thereby served to emphasise an ethno-linguistic majoritarian notion of belonging as the primary benchmark for local enactments of liberal democracy. These local practices thus departed from the central state’s constitutional commitment to guarantee the rights and interests of its tribal ‘minority’ citizens – including the protection of their mother tongue. Before considering the impact of the 1951 census in the Dangs on adivasi groups in greater detail, however, we might also analyse how educative efforts to ‘uplift’ the adivasis in the post-independence period reflected earlier interwar imperatives amongst some Indian and Hindu nationalists. Just as forms of ‘uplift’ looked to more firmly incorporate adivasis within the Hindu fold, imparting education through the ‘official’ language of the province or district, rather than the adivasis’ mother tongue, served to more closely assimilate tribals with the ‘majority’ linguistic community. Attempts to define the ethnicity of India’s large adivasi population in the context of the census therefore had longer antecedents, linked to Hindu communal mobilisation and notions of Hindu unity. The religious allegiances of tribal communities came to be seen as particularly decisive in regions with large percentages of both Hindu and Muslim populations ahead of the 1941 Census. For instance, high-caste Hindu nationalist organisations in Bengal ‘were at pains to point out the long standing erroneous basis of colonial ethnographies, particularly in their apparent desire to set out the separate religious and ethnic identities of tribal and low caste groups’.53 Tribal groups were encouraged to identify as Hindu, and there were instances of violence between Santals (an adivasi community in eastern India) and Muslims in the city of Rajshahi.54 Some British administrators too, such as the Superintendent of Census Operations in Bombay for the 1921 Census L. J. Sedgwick, expressed similar sentiments to the Hindu nationalists in this regard: The Bhils, who contribute most to the figures, are practically Hindus, and the other castes seem to be so also. I have therefore no hesitation in saying that Animism as a religion should be entirely abandoned, and that all those hitherto classed as Animists should be grouped with Hindus at the next Census, Hinduism being defined as including the religious or semi-religious beliefs of those jungle tribes who have not definitely embraced Islam or Christianity.55 In many ways, this was a longstanding concern, first expressed with conviction in U. N. Mukherji’s Hindus: A Dying Race (1909), which had suggested a steady decline in Hindu numbers in the census figures of Bengal at the expense of the

Classifying and counting language 153 province’s Muslim population.56 Efforts to have tribal communities’ religious beliefs classified as within the ambit of Hinduism at the census complemented wider efforts amongst some Indian nationalists to ‘uplift’ a wide spectrum of ‘low-castes’ from their present ‘backward’ state. The problem of ‘untouchability’ was to be defined by many as an internal, specifically Hindu, concern, distinct from Muslim interests. For example, the Bombay Sentinel reported in November 1935 that Commotion [had] prevailed for a time at a mass meeting of Harijans held last night at Deolali attended by some Muslims when Pandarinath Maratha a Caste Hindu speaker uttered a word of warning to Muslims to keep aloof from the domestic troubles of the Hindus. . . . Pandarinath regretted that Muslims should take unfair advantage of “the sorry state of affairs, purely of domestic nature in the Hindu family. Their jubilation over our troubles were not becoming. Their one idea is to proselytise and kill Hinduism”.57 For Gandhi too, this was a Hindu religious issue, to be overcome by religious solutions. This was most evident in his reaction to the Communal Award of 1932, when it was announced that the Depressed Classes (Dalits/’untouchables’) were to receive separate electorates to complement those already provided for Muslims. In response, Gandhi committed himself to a ‘perpetual fast unto death’, which would only end if the scheme for communal electorates was withdrawn.58 Under pressure from Gandhi’s supporters, Ambedkar, who had been the most vocal proponent of separate electorates for ‘untouchables’, relinquished this demand. In the compromise between Gandhi and Ambedkar known as the Poona Pact, untouchable representation was guaranteed within a general electorate of Hindus instead. The repercussions of these events have continued to influence the nature of lowcaste representation in Indian politics ever since. In late 1935 Ambedkar threatened to lead his followers in a mass Dalit conversion renouncing Hinduism, by proclaiming that he was ‘born a Hindu but would not die a Hindu’.59 In response to Ambedkar’s efforts to overcome the social and economic subjugation of Dalits at the hands of caste Hindus, Gandhi commented in October of that year, ‘I am convinced that a change of faith . . . will not serve the cause which they have at heart . . . especially when it is remembered that their lives for good or evil are intertwined with those of caste Hindus’.60 Equally, ahead of enumeration at the 1941 Census in Bengal, special efforts were made to stress the Hindu ethno-religious allegiance of low-caste and adivasi communities.61 ‘Orthodox’ Hindus or Sanatanists, who still resisted efforts to remove ‘untouchability’ and grant Dalits equal access to temples, wells and other public conveniences, were condemned as ‘mainly instrumental in driving their co-religionists from the Hindu fold [because they] do not believe in numbers’.62 Hinduism was thus perceived by Hindu nationalists as being ‘under threat’ from external efforts on the part of both Muslims and the colonial state, as well as ‘internally’ both by the perils of mass ‘untouchable’ conversion and a recalcitrant Hindu orthodoxy. Meanwhile, for the more ostensibly ‘secular’ pretensions of the Congress,

154

Classifying and counting language

emphasis upon the separate identities of low-caste groups potentially undermined their efforts to cultivate and represent Indian unity. Ongoing discussions about low-caste and tribal ‘backwardness’ were frequently couched within the often complementary discourses of western ‘modernisation’ and high-caste Hindu ‘uplift’, in which educational reform would wean the adivasis from their ‘habitual vices’ such as drinking, uncleanliness, excessive borrowing and petty crime.63 And ‘uplift’ and its connotations of incorporation within the Hindu ‘fold’ continued to find favour in the post-independence period, despite the state’s claims to communal impartiality. The Report on Educational Expansion in the Adivasi Areas of the Thana District in Bombay, for example, suggested that, ‘It is only through proper education that a new society, intelligent and able, industrious and persevering, honest and faithful, self-reliant and self-respecting, clean and tidy can be created’.64 These endeavours frequently emphasised the necessity of emulating higher status communities, thereby underscoring notions of social inadequacy amongst the adivasis by seeking to inculcate the norms and traditions of the upper castes and classes amongst them.65 A particularly perceptive social commentator, who sent a letter to The Times of India in January 1936, noted that the uplift programmes of the 1930s often ensured that low-caste groups were thought of as ‘impure or polluted and as such the treatment given to them by selfish and orthodox Hindu society is fully justified’.66 Attempts to improve the social welfare of lowcaste Hindu groups such as the adivasis was repeatedly undercut by efforts to incorporate tribal groups within the Hindu fold, whilst also remaining intimately linked with the processes of classification and enumeration at the census. In the late 1940s and 1950s, an increased emphasis upon ethno-linguistic unity amongst Maharashtrians and Gujaratis had a similar impact upon social reform in western India. This time, ostensible commitments to improve the welfare of adivasis residing in the Dangs and certain talukas of Thana and West Khandesh Districts were adversely affected by efforts to include them amongst Marathi or Gujarati speakers ahead of provincial reorganisation. Again, the census was to play a key role in this process, despite its supposed new emphasis upon economic classificatory categories. And these developments were also to have a significant part within the formulation of ideas about democracy amongst those in the locality, focusing upon provincial notions of ethno-linguistic affinity which contravened and disregarded the ostensible principles of the state to protect ‘minority’ interests. The decision to enumerate the inhabitants of Bombay Province on the basis of their mother tongue had, like the matter of religion, often been a rather contentious issue. In the same year as he deprecated the continued efficacy of the category ‘Animism’ to describe the religion of the province’s adivasi community, L. J. Sedgwick also suggested that the enumeration of language should be ended at the next census.67 Yet, despite his efforts, mother tongue was still being counted and classified in the census in 1951, during which time cogent and vocal movements for the linguistic reorganisation of provincial administrative boundaries had now emerged. Between the interwar period and the post-independence era, another notable and interlinked change had taken place. In the Dangs, the number of adivasis who had been recorded as speaking the local adivasi vernacular, known as either Bhili or

Classifying and counting language 155 Dangi, had seemingly completely disintegrated. In 1931, figures for the Dangs had shown 32,350 Bhili speakers, 731 Gujarati speakers and 613 Marathi speakers. In stark contrast, the 1951 enumeration classified 45,017 inhabitants of the district as professing Marathi as their mother tongue, 1,802 speaking Gujarati, and no notable representation of Bhili or Dangi at all.68 These changes were reflected elsewhere in Bombay, albeit not quite on the same rapid scale, with East Khandesh seeing Bhili speakers within the district decline from nearly 3 per cent to 0.67 per cent between 1911 and 1951, and Surat District going from 3.28 per cent to 0.95 per cent over the same period.69 In his official report on the census returns of 1951, Census Superintendent J. B. Bowman suggested that this decline reflected ‘the spread of communications and the growth of education’, which was ensuring that ‘the standard languages are tending to drive the dialects out’.70 Yet, this sweeping tide of standardised languages also threatened to abrogate the ideological imperatives of Article 29.1 of the new Indian Constitution. Seeking to guarantee the rights of Indian ‘minorities’, it read as follows: ‘Any section of the citizens residing in the territory of India or any part thereof having a distinct language, script or culture of its own shall have the right to conserve the same’.71 Whilst in the previous chapter of this book we noted how this commitment was primarily conceived and applied in the interests of India’s Muslims in the north and the protection of their distinctiveness through Urdu, it could also be recontextualised elsewhere in the subcontinent and applied to linguistic minorities. The linguistic medium through which education was to be imparted proved a matter of concern for the Survey Committee for West Khandesh District Backward Area Education, who were appointed to make recommendations for the improvement of adivasi’s social, economic and political conditions in 1954. The Survey Committee noted that, The language spoken by these tribes are local dialects which differ from each other to some extent. The men folk can understand Marathi for practical purposes. Some of them can speak it also. But the Women folk and especially the small children find it difficult either to follow the regional language or communicate their thoughts in any language except their own dialect. This has made the problem of imparting elementary education in the initial stages rather difficult.72 However, despite noting the continuing importance of the adivasi vernacular (Bhili), the Survey Committee recommended that the children of the tribal community in West Khandesh would only be taught with the help of Bhili during their ‘preparatory’ and ‘first standard’ years of primary education. Beyond these early stages, the rest of their primary education was to be conducted in Marathi. Adivasi vernaculars, then, were to be gradually replaced by the major regional languages as a concomitant of the educational ‘civilising’/‘uplift’ process, thereby mirroring the substitution of adivasi customs and traditions with high-caste alternatives that augmented efforts to include low-caste groups within the broader Hindu community. The wider implications such a recommendation had upon the protection of

156

Classifying and counting language

minority languages and customs, whilst acknowledged by the Survey Committee, were ultimately overruled: we have to qualify the application of this principle in the case of dilects [sic] which are spoken only by a few thousands or a few lakhs of people, in a comparatively small area and which have no prospect of ever becoming regional or state languages.73 Favouring Marathi as the district’s official language, as well as those who could communicate through it, had important implications for democracy in the district, privileging an ethno-linguistic majoritarianism that departed from the guarantees to communal minorities favoured by Nehru’s central government. The medium through which to conduct education amongst the adivasis was also deemed critical in the Dangs District. Reporting in January 1949, for example, the District Collector noted that in an area consisting of only 335 villages, of which none had more than 1,000 inhabitants, as many as 80 new Marathi schools and 40 new Gujarati schools had recently been opened.74 In both West Khandesh and the Dangs, these attempts to impart the majority of education amongst tribal groups through the major regional languages can be linked to larger processes, whereby the ethno-linguistic affinity of the province’s adivasis became a site of contestation between proponents of Maharashtra and Gujarat as linguistic provinces. In this manner, efforts at ‘uplift’ in western India amongst Maharashtrians and Gujaratis echoed similar attempts amongst high-caste Hindus to ensure adivasis were recorded as Hindus in the context of Hindu-Muslim enumeration in 1941. The sudden collapse in numbers of those inhabitants of the Dangs who were recorded as speaking Bhili at the 1951 Census must therefore be understood within this wider, interlinked context of ‘uplift’, communal incorporation and census demographics. Before considering the 1951 Census in the Dangs in detail, however, it is necessary to provide some historical context regarding this particular patch of territory, as to why it was so keenly contested.

The Dangs and linguistic reorganisation The Dangs had always maintained a rather special, ambivalent relationship with the rest of Bombay Province after it had been subjugated and pacified by the East India Company in 1842. First and foremost, it remained apart from British India, as the various indigenous tribal rulers of the Dangs maintained some measure of sovereignty and autonomy in their actions. However, from an early stage, the British imposed upon these princes their right to extract the region’s timber in exchange for a hereditary annuity. And even though British laws and regulations theoretically did not apply, by the 1930s ‘the area [was] virtually administered by a British Officer who administers justice in the spirit of British Indian laws and codes’.75 So whilst the Dangs was not officially part of British India, it was in many ways entirely different from other princely states, too. It was in many ways already a district of Bombay in all but name, albeit with forms of special ‘protective’

Classifying and counting language 157 legislation implemented ostensibly in the interests of the region’s tribes.76 Before 1903, it was under the administrative control of the District Collector of the predominantly Marathi-speaking area of West Khandesh, but after this period, it was included afresh within the jurisdiction of the principally Gujarati-speaking Surat District.77 Historical fluctuations in its administrative location helped sow the seeds for later disagreements. In the aftermath of independence, the princely states came to be integrated under the national Indian government. The Dangs was formed into a separate district within Bombay Province, despite it being relatively small at only 650 miles, and populated by a mere 45,000-odd people. However, with its amalgamation, it also became necessary for the Bombay Government to sanction the new district’s official language. And it was this requirement that was to prove to be the first bone of contention between Marathi and Gujarati speakers in postcolonial Bombay, particularly in the context of demands for provincial reorganisation. The Dang Seva Mandal (The Dangs Service Association), based at Nasik, for example, argued that, ‘All Government correspondence addressed to the villager should only be made in Marathi’, as the tribal population ‘speak and understand well Marathi, even children and women’.78 On the other hand, a meeting held under the auspices of the Gujarati timber merchants proposed ‘that they should get a competent cine-photographer who would take talking pictures [i.e. cine-film] of the Dangs and its people’, as well as hiring language specialists as a means to prove that the region’s inhabitants were ethno-linguistically Gujarati.79 By May 1949, the issue was becoming so heated that the Marathi-speaking Prime Minister B. G. Kher and the Gujarati-speaking Revenue Minister Morarji Desai toured the Dangs in an effort to form an impression as to the language of the people and therefore put an end to the controversy. They ultimately decided that the official language of the Dangs should be Marathi and ‘that the responsibility for primary education of children in the Dangs district should be undertaken by the Government and carried out either departmentally or through a Board which may be trusted with this work’.80 This Board was to provide facilities for learning in either the Gujarati or Marathi state languages where more than 20 children petitioned that they required it, meaning some villages were to have more than one educational medium. Just as in Khandesh, however, there was no provision for the local Bhili/ Dhangi vernacular within these schemes. The hugely diminished returns for Bhili in the 1951 Census was in part the responsibility of Kher and Desai, who had been so vocal in their declaration that the district’s official language was Marathi. But the returns also reflected larger processes whereby the census continued to serve as a site of communal political interest, despite the central government’s efforts to emphasise economic classifications instead. Perhaps most importantly in this regard, certain ‘contractions’ had been introduced in the 1951 Census within Bombay, with the emphasis now focusing upon establishing relatively unambiguous data with regards to mother tongue ahead of provincial reorganisation. The Superintendent of Census Operations commented,

158

Classifying and counting language For instance, in the case of the question on mother tongue, the enumerator was asked to write 1 for Marathi, 2 for Gujarati and 3 for Kannada. Since the language question in the Dangs had been settled before the Census took place in the most sensible way possible by two important and impartial persons giving their award [Kher and Desai], the enumerators recorded “1” i.e., Marathi as the mother tongue in the case of people who spoke the language spoken in the Dangs. In many cases the speakers themselves would not put the label “Marathi” on the language they speak any more than they would put the label “Hindu” on the religion they practice.81

Efforts to collect straightforward data on the three-way divide between the major administrative languages within Bombay Province therefore provided the structure through which local tribal vernaculars could be absorbed by the proponents of Maharashtra and Gujarat at the census. Yet, it was the enumerators themselves who were central to this transformation in the statistical returns, as it was these everyday census officials who fleshed out the larger enumerative and classificatory processes of the census at the local level. In 1921, Census Superintendent L. J. Sedgwick had circulated supplementary instructions to these intermediaries in Bombay ahead of enumeration, which had focused in particular on mother tongue. He advised the enumerators to ‘Remember that you are to enter the language which each person talks in his home and not the language in which he talks to you. . . . Bhils and some other wild tribes speak languages of their own’.82 Despite such recommendations, Sedgwick noted that in practice, local classificatory procedures would often depart significantly from the state’s claims to communal impartiality: ‘Enumerators who speak Marathi or Gujarati enter any Bhil whose dialect they understand as a Marathi speaker, or a Gujarati speaker as the case may be’.83 Thus, even inadvertently, census officials, who were invariably from non-tribal communities, could privilege standardised, official languages at the expense of local tribal vernaculars. By mediating adivasi voices at the census, these enumerative ‘outsiders’ ensured there was no real opportunity for the state to garner tribals’ own outlook on their mother tongue. Indeed, representatives of the state at the local level frequently expressed condescending attitudes towards the tribal community, which suggested they were not really interested in what the adivasis themselves believed. The District Collector of the Dangs, for example, argued in 1948 that, The people of this tract, in my opinion, are not so much interested in the matter of official language inasmuch as they are most primitive, uncivilized, backward and most illiterate (as will appear from the 182 thumb impressions affixed to this petition).84 In these circumstances, census data frequently departed from the opinions of British and Indian philologists on tribal languages. For example, with regards to the tribal vernacular in East and West Khandesh, known as ‘Ahirani’ or ‘Khandeshi’,

Classifying and counting language 159 In 1911 we get the following: Ahirani 113, Khandeshi 133, Rangari 32, Gavli 125, Chitodi 60; Possible total 463. Yet the Linguistic Survey estimates the number of speakers at 1,253,066, all of which would be in Khandesh and the regions immediately adjoining.85 The difficulties in establishing the correct figures from local enumerative practices became even more apparent at the 1951 Census where, as we have seen, the classificatory structure surrounding mother tongue in Bombay was based around numerical ‘contractions’. The 1951 Census Superintendent J. B. Bowman suggested that, ‘The Enumerator’s reasoning is probably as follows: “My mothertongue is Marathi or Gujarati. I can understand this man’s language perfectly. Therefore he speaks Marathi or Gujarati”’.86 But the matter was even further complicated by the continuing demands for linguistic reorganisation, in which the ethno-linguistic allegiances of the adivasi community became of critical importance ahead of boundary demarcation. During a debate within the Bombay Legislative Assembly in August 1954, Morarji Desai, who had now become the Chief Minister, put the shift in the Dangs district from Bhili/Dangi to Marathi down to ‘provincial jealousies and manoeuvres’. This had obscured the fact that, ‘Really speaking, the language spoken in the Dangs is Dangi’.87 For those who argued that the adivasis’ mother tongue was Gujarati or Marathi, but for whom the census figures did not concur, recourse was made instead to suitable linguistic authorities or historical factors. A letter received by the Government of India from the Gujarat Vepari Mahamandal (Gujarat Chamber of Commerce), for example, made reference to the findings of both the Gujarat Research Society and George Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India (11 volumes, 1903–1928), to argue that the language spoken in the Dangs ‘was basically Gujarati or allied to Gujarati’.88 In both the census returns and in references to historical ties and ethno-linguistic affinities, the state’s ostensible efforts to protect the interests of adivasi minorities were therefore being overridden by the growing tide of ethno-linguistic majoritarianism within western India. This rise in an ethnic interpretation of citizenship was deprecated by the Gujarati leader of the Praja Socialist Party in Bombay Dr Amul M. Desai, during a debate on the States Reorganisation Bill within the Bombay Legislative Assembly in April 1956. At pains to stress that he had always been against linguistic reorganisation despite now introducing an amendment that suggested the Dangs should go to Gujarat, he argued that the ‘guiding principle’ behind reorganisation should be what the adivasis themselves wanted. Too much importance had been placed upon ‘what their grand-fathers were or where they came from, from the north or from the south or whether they were Dravidians or Aryans. Today the people have to decide their own fate’.89 He went on to argue: I do not for a moment want to make a claim that the language of the Adivasis in Umbergaon Taluka [Thana District] is the Gujarati language. Unfortunately, things have not been put in the correct perspective. One side should have put forward the claim that the language of Adivasis in Umbergaon Taluka is

160

Classifying and counting language influenced more by Gujarati language and the other side should have put forward the claim that it is influenced more by Marathi language. And it would have been a very rational approach if the final decision had been left to a final authority.90

Any claim that the adivasis actually spoke Bhili or Dangi was notable by its absence in Desai’s proposal. The sudden diminishment in the figures of those adivasis being recorded as speaking Bhili/Dangi in the Dangs and elsewhere in western India, as well as the concomitant increase in the number of Marathi and Gujarati speakers in these areas, can therefore be tied in with the circumstances of provincial reorganisation. Mother tongue demographics were deemed critical to a ‘politics of numbers’, whereby the ethno-linguistic affinities amongst the tribal populations of these peripheral districts would potentially determine precisely where the line of demarcation would be drawn. Everyday enumerative practices and processes in these regions therefore served to emphasise an ethnic majoritarianism which favoured the major, official provincial languages above and beyond the state’s special commitment to protect the rights and interests of its tribal minorities. In such circumstances, these hitherto neglected areas of the province took on a new importance in 1951. Yet, these developments around the census also interacted with larger processes whereby western India’s tribal populations in the Dangs, Thana and West Khandesh were to be ‘uplifted’ and ‘civilised’. Educational ‘reform’ not only emphasised high-caste Hindu norms and practices as an exemplary mode of behaviour, but also ensured the gradual replacement of tribal vernaculars such as Ahirani, Bhili, Dangi or Khandeshi with standardised versions of Gujarati and Marathi. So whilst these reforms reflected attempts to improve the social welfare of adivasis, they were frequently undercut by efforts to incorporate tribal communities within Maharashtrian or Gujarati society in the context of classification and enumeration at the census. In the circumstances, the distinctive blend of Gujarati, Marathi Rajasthani and ‘aboriginal’ influences that made up such tribal languages as Bhili were fast disappearing.

Conclusion This chapter has suggested that the classification and enumeration of communities at the census was always a dynamic process, fluctuating in response to prominent local exigencies and concerns. Whereas in previous decennial censuses, for example, the collection of data on mother tongue had been a relatively uncontroversial process, in 1951 it became critical ahead of linguistic reorganisation. In many ways the increased controversy over mother tongue in western India reflected similar concerns and preoccupations to those that developed around religion in 1941. And in some senses, mobilisations around religion in the northeast and northwest in 1941, and around language in Bombay a decade later, were both manifestations of ideas about self-government and local democracy articulated in a regional milieu. But by focusing upon Bombay rather than the north, this chapter has simultaneously looked to decipher an alternative set of circumstances through which ideas

Classifying and counting language 161 about democracy and community were conceptualised and enacted that departs from the emphasis upon the ‘Hindu-Muslim Question’ and the creation of Pakistan in much of the existing literature. The collection of data on various forms of community therefore continued to be utilised for political purposes beyond independence, despite central government rhetoric that emphasised state detachedness and communal impartiality. Key to the performance of enumerative and classificatory processes at the census, as we have seen, were the local census officials, who acted as the intermediaries of the state for many ordinary Indians. Local circumstances thereby ensured frequent fluctuations and transformations in the state’s knowledge of Indian society. The privileged position of enumerators, mediating the state’s power and its formulation of knowledge often allowed them to seek political, social and material advantage in the process for their particular community. Rumours abounded that enumerators, ahead of the boundary demarcation that would accompany provincial reorganisation, were manipulating census figures on mother tongue. Representations and petitions received by the provincial government argued for greater control over the selection of census officials, sometimes demanding the substitution of enumerators for those from their own linguistic community instead, or that local enumerators should be divided equally on the basis of their mother tongues. At other times, petitioners appealed to the state’s supposed impartiality and ‘unimpeachable integrity’, emphasising the enumerator’s role as one of detachedness and disinterestedness in the enumerative process. However, the very need for local knowledge to ensure the census’ ultimate comprehensiveness ensured that pressure could still be applied to favour one’s community in the census returns. The impending linguistic reorganisation of provincial boundaries also had an important impact upon the social position of minority communities within western India. An increased emphasis upon ethno-linguistic unity amongst Maharashtrians and Gujaratis, for example, ensured that the affinities of adivasis in the Dangs, Thana and West Khandesh were to become sites of contestation between proponents of Gujarati- and Marathi-speaking states at the census. Over the course of the interwar period and into the post-independence era, the number of adivasis who had been recorded as speaking local tribal vernaculars such as Ahirani, Bhili or Dangi had declined dramatically, at the expense of the official provincial languages. This owed something to local enumerative procedures, whereby census officials, as ‘outsiders’, would privilege official languages, often because of their own linguistic affinities. But it was also related to the processes of ‘uplift’, which mirrored earlier efforts to inculcate high-caste norms and habits amongst the ‘backward classes’. In an analogous manner, educational reform amongst adivasis in western India frequently sought to impart education in Marathi or Gujarati rather than tribal vernaculars. By doing so, an increased emphasis was put upon the linguistic cohesiveness of the region and its inhabitants. Both local educational and enumerative procedures thereby departed from the state’s constitutional commitment to protect the cultural and linguistic rights and interests of India’s minorities. In this sense, this chapter has had something important to say about India’s burgeoning form of democratic governance, too. Whilst the state was ostensibly

162

Classifying and counting language

committed to improving the socio-economic welfare of its citizens on an individual basis, this message was mediated and undermined by its local representatives at the census, who served to retrench the community identities the state otherwise sought to challenge and uproot.

Notes 1 Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 201. 2 Ronald Inden, Imagining India, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990. 3 Dirks, Castes of Mind, p. 202; see also, Bernard Cohn, ‘The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia’, in An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays, ed. by Bernard Cohn, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 224–254; Inden, Imagining India; Arjun Appadurai, ‘Number in the Colonial Imagination’, in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. by Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993, pp. 314–339. 4 Dirks, Castes of Mind, p. 227. 5 Norbert Peabody, ‘Cents, Sense, Census: Human Inventories in Late Precolonial and Early Colonial India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History [henceforth CSSH], 43 (2001), 819–850; Sumit Guha, ‘The Politics of Identity and Enumeration in India, c.1600–1990’, CSSH, 45 (2003), 148–167; Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India 1780–1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 6 Susan Bayly, ‘Caste and “Race” in the Colonial Ethnography of India’, in The Concept of Race in South Asia, ed. by Peter Robb, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 165–218. 7 See also Christopher Pinney, ‘Colonial Anthropology in the “Laboratory of Mankind”’, in The Raj: India and the British, 1600–1947, ed. by Christopher A. Bayly, London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 1990, pp. 252–263. 8 Peabody, ‘Cents, Sense, Census’, pp. 819–820. 9 L. J. Sedgwick, Census of India, 1921, Volume VIII: Bombay Presidency, Part I: General Report, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1922, pp. ii–iii. 10 Chris J. Fuller and John Harriss, ‘For an Anthropology of the Modern Indian State’, in The Everyday State and Society in Modern India, ed. by C. J. Fuller and Véronique Bénéï, London: Hurst and Company, 2001, pp. 1–30 (p. 26); Akhil Gupta, ‘Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State’, American Ethnologist, 22 (1995), 375–402 (p. 384). 11 William Gould, Religion and Conflict in Modern South Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 157. 12 Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, ‘Transfer of Power and the Crisis of Dalit Politics in India, 1945–1947’, Modern Asian Studies, 34 (2000), 893–942. 13 See, for example, the essays in N. Gerald Barrier’s edited volume on the census: Kenneth W. Jones, ‘Religious Identity and the Indian Census’, in The Census in British India: New Perspectives, ed. by Norman Gerald Barrier, New Delhi: Manohar, 1981, pp. 73–101; Harry W. Blair, ‘Caste and the British Census in Bihar: Using Old Data to Study Contemporary Political Behaviour’, in The Census in British India: New Perspectives, ed. by Norman Gerald Barrier, New Delhi: Manohar, 1981, pp. 151–175; Frank F. Conlon, ‘The Census of India as a Source for the Historical Study of Religion and Caste’, in The Census in British India: New Perspectives, ed. by Norman Gerald Barrier, New Delhi: Manohar, 1981, pp. 103–117; G. A. Oddie, ‘Christians in the Census: Tanjore and Trichinopoly Districts, 1871–1901’, in The Census in British India: New Perspectives, ed. by Norman Gerald Barrier, New Delhi: Manohar, 1981, pp. 119–149.

Classifying and counting language 163 14 David Washbrook, ‘Towards a History of the Present: Southern Perspectives on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition, ed. by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rochona Majumdar and Andrew Sartori, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 332–357 (p. 332). 15 J. B. Bowman, Census of India 1951, Language Handbook: Sholapur, Satara South, Bijapur and Kolhapur Districts, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1955, pp. 1–12; J. B. Bowman, Census of India, 1951, Volume IV: Bombay, Saurashtra and Kutch, Part II-A: General Population Tables, Social and Cultural Tables and Summary Figures by Talukas and Petas, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1953, pp. 135–144. 16 New Delhi, National Archives of India [henceforth NAI], Government of India [henceforth GOI], Home Department File 74/62/52 – Pub. I, ‘Appendix B: District Wise Statement Showing the Scheduled Tribes Population and Is Percentage to the Population in the Bombay State According to the Census 1951’, n.d. 17 MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 7699/46 – Pt. V, ‘B.G. Kher, Chief Minister of Bombay, “Appeal”’, 7 February 1951. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 275. 21 See J. B. Bowman, Census of India, 1951, Volume IV: Bombay, Saurashtra and Kutch, Part I: Report and Subsidiary Tables, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1953, Chapter VII. 22 Herbert H. Risley, Census of India, 1901, Volume I: India: Ethnographic Appendices: Being the Data Upon Which the Caste Chapter of the Report Is Based, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903, p. 93; see also, Herbert H. Risley and Edward A. Gait, Census of India, 1901, Volume I: India: Report, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1903, pp. 514, 526. 23 J. B. Bowman, Census of India 1951, Language Handbook: Dangs, Thana and Banaskantha Districts, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1955, p. i. 24 Bowman, Census of India, 1951, Language Handbook, Volume IV, Part I, p. 1. 25 Quoted in Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia, London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 86–87. 26 Maharashtra Ekikaran Samiti, Belgaum, Belgaum City: Integral Part of Maharashtra: Memorandum Submitted to the States Reorganisation Commission by the Maharashtra Ekikaran Samiti, Belgaum, Poona: P. R. Damdhere, n.d., p. 36. 27 See NAI, GOI, Home Department File 4557/31-Pub, ‘Note of J.H. Hutton, Superintendent of Census Operations’, 17 September 1930; NAI, GOI, Home Department File 45/22/31-Pub, ‘Indication of Literacy in Urdu and Hindi in the Present Census’, 23 January 1931. 28 MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 7699/46 – Pt. V, ‘Kher, “Appeal”’, 7 February 1951. 29 MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 7699/46 – Pt. V, ‘Letter from M.S. Sirdar, Bar-at-Law, Sholapur, to the Collector, Sholapur’, 23 February 1951. 30 Ibid., ‘Letter from the President of the Census Committee of the Kannada Population at Belgaum, to the Superintendent of Census Operations for Bombay, “Urgent Need for Appointing Impartial Agencies and Enumerators at the Ensuing Census Operations”’, 16 January 1951. 31 Ibid. 32 Thomas Blom Hansen, ‘Governance and Myths of the State in Mumbai’, in The Everyday State and Society in Modern India, ed. by Chris J. Fuller and Véronique Bénéï, London: Hurst and Company, 2001, pp. 31–67. 33 MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 7699/46 – Pt. V, ‘Letter from the President of the Census Committee’, 16 January 1951.

164 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59

Classifying and counting language

Ibid. Ibid., ‘Letter from the Mamlatdar of Athani to the Collector of Belgaum’, 5 March 1951. Ibid. Ibid., ‘Letter from President, Karnatak PCC, to Minister for Home and Revenue’, 22 January 1951; ibid., ‘Letter from A.J. Doddameti, Belgaum, to Shri Morarji Desai, Minister for Home and Revenue’, 17 February 1951. Ibid., ‘Letter from R.K. Anpat, Collector of Belgaum, to J.B. Bowman, Superintendent of Census Operations for Bombay, Saurashtra and Kutch’, 1–2 February 1951. NAI, GOI, Home Department File 45/40-Pub, ‘Home Department Note’, 5 December 1940. Ibid., ‘Note of M.W.M. Yeatts’, 21 December 1940. See also in this regard, William Gould, ‘Contesting Secularism in Colonial and Postcolonial North India between the 1930s and 1950s’, Contemporary South Asia, 14 (2005), 481–494 (p. 484). William Gould, Bureaucracy, Community and Influence in India: Society and the State, 1930s-1960s, London: Routledge, 2011, p. 170. MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 2875/46 – Pt. II, ‘A Note Regarding the Boundaries of North Karnatak, submitted to the Linguistic Provinces Commission in verification of the oral evidence tendered by me on 28th October 1948 at Hubli when the Merged States Areas delegation was examined’. Appended to, ‘Letter from the Collector of Belgaum to the Chief Secretary to the GOB, Political and Services Department’, 3 February 1949. Risley, Census of India, 1901, Volume I: India: Ethnographic Appendices, p. 93; Risley and Gait, Census of India, 1901, Volume I: India: Report, pp. 514, 526. Gould, Religion and Conflict, p. 157. MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 2875/46 – Pt. I, ‘A Note Regarding the Boundaries of North Karnatak’. Appended to, ‘Letter from the Collector of Belgaum’, 3 February 1949. ‘The Unification of Karnatak: A Moral Necessity: (By H.S. Kaujalgi)’, Bombay Chronicle (Bombay), 22 October 1936. Ibid. Ibid. Bowman, Census of India 1951, Language Handbook: Sholapur, Satara South, Bijapur and Kolhapur Districts, p. ii. Mr. K.G. Gokhale (Belgaum South), 4 April 1938. Bombay Legislative Assembly [henceforth BLA] Debates, Volume III (18–34), March–April 1938, p. 1728. MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 2026/46 – Pt. IV, ‘Letter from D.M. Kulkarni, Advocate, Karwar (Dt. N. Kanara), to B.G. Kher, Prime Minister and Minister for Education, Bombay’, 10 May 1949. Gould, Religion and Conflict, p. 159. Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 199–200. Sedgwick, Census of India, 1921, Volume VIII, Part I, p. 67. Pradip Kumar Datta, ‘Dying Hindus: Production of Hindu Communal Common-Sense in Early Twentieth-Century Bengal’, Economic and Political Weekly [henceforth EPW ], 28 (1993), 1305–1319. ‘Commotion at Harijan Meeting: Sequel to “Hands Off ” Warning to Muslims’, Bombay Sentinel (Bombay), 11 November 1935. ‘Mohandas K. Gandhi to Ramsay Macdonald, 18 August 1932’, Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume XL, New Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India, 1999, pp. 383–384. Quoted in Shabnum Tejani, Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008, p. 227. Ambedkar had been threatening the possibility of conversion since the 1920s. He finally chose to convert to Buddhism in 1956, just before his death in the same year. Many of

Classifying and counting language 165

60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

his supporters, particularly those from the Mahar Dalit community in Maharashtra, followed him into the Buddhist religion. See Gail Omvedt, Dalit Visions: Tracts for the Times/8, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1994, pp. 44–45, 51. ‘Untouchability on Last Legs: Mr. Gandhi Deplores Dr. Ambedkar’s Speech’, Times of India (Bombay), 16 October 1935. Chatterji, Bengal Divided, pp. 191–200; Gould, Religion and Conflict, pp. 159–160. ‘To the Editor of “The Chronicle”’, Bombay Chronicle, 16 October 1935. Sumit Sarkar, Writing Social History, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 380. Committee Appointed by the Government of Bombay for a Programme of Educational Expansion in the Adivasi Areas of the Thana District, Report of the Committee Appointed by the Government of Bombay for a Programme of Educational Expansion in the Adivasi Areas of the Thana District, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1948, p. 8. Chris J. Fuller, The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 256. ‘Harijan Uplift: To the Editor of the Times of India: P. Balakrishnan’, Times of India, 14 January 1936. Sedgwick, Census of India, 1921, Volume VIII, Part I, p. 151. Bowman, Census of India 1951, Language Handbook: Dangs, Thana and Banaskantha Districts, pp. ii, 1. MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 1154/H (1954), ‘Table II: Linguistic Data: Statement Showing Percentage of Population Speaking Bhili, Marathi and Gujarati as Mother Tongue since 1911’, n.d. Bowman, Census of India, 1951, Volume IV, Part I, p. 147. ‘Article 29(1)’, The Constitution of India, p. 14. Survey Committee for West Khandesh District Backward Area Education, Report of Survey Committee for West Khandesh District Backward Area Education, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1954, p. 7. Ibid., p. 19. MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 2026/46 – Pt. II, ‘Letter from the Collector, Dangs District, to the Secretary to the GOB, Home (Special) Department, “Weekly Confidential Report”’, 10 January 1949. MSA, GOB, Reforms Office File 239, ‘Political and Reforms Department Note’, n.d. Historians have stressed the importance of huge variations in the relationship between the colonial authorities and the native princely states, in an effort to overcome approaches which stereotype and treat them in a reductionist manner. See Waltraud Ernst and Biswamoy Pati, ‘People, Princes and Colonialism’, in India’s Princely States: Peoples, Princes and Colonialism, ed. by Waltraud Ernst and Biswamoy Pati, London: Routledge, 2007, pp. 1–14. MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 2026/46 – Pt. II, ‘Letter from Assistant Secretary, Church of the Brethren Mission, Ahwa Dangs’, 23 July 1931. Ibid., ‘Letter to Dr. B.G. Kher, Prime Minister of the GOB, from the Dang Seva Mandal, Nasik’, 18 October 1948. MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 2026/46 – Pt. I, ‘Extract from the Weekly Confidential Report of the District Magistrate, Dangs’, 12 April 1949. MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 2026/46 – Pt. II, ‘Draft Press Note’, 18 May 1949. MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 1154/H (1954), ‘Copy of a Note from the Superintendent of Census Operations, Bombay State’, n.d. Sedgwick, Census of India, 1921, Volume VIII, Part I, p. 151. Ibid., pp. 157–158. MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 1154/H (1954), ‘Letter from Collector, Dangs District, to the Chief Secretary to the GOB, Political and Services Department’, 10 December 1948. Sedgwick, Census of India, 1921, Volume VIII, Part I, pp. 156–157.

166

Classifying and counting language

86 MSA, GOB, Political and Services Department File 1154/H (1954), ‘Political and Services Department Note’, n.d. 87 Ibid., ‘Debate in the BLA Regarding Language of Dangs District’, 25 August 1954. 88 NAI, GOI, Home Department File 51/87/51 – Pub, ‘Letter from Gujarat Vepari Mahamandal to the Secretary, Revenue Department, GOB, “Proposals for Reconstitution of Talukas and Mahals”’, 28 September 1950. 89 Dr Amul M. Desai (Valsad), 5 April 1956. BLA Debates, Volume XXXI, Part II (ii), February–March 1956, p. 1877. 90 Ibid., p. 1879.

7

Conclusion

As the idea of Samyukta Maharashtra was debated and delineated during the protracted transition from colonial rule to independent nationhood, Marathi speakers, or, more restrictively, members of the Maratha caste, envisaged and stressed their status as the rightful inhabitants of the proposed province, who intrinsically belonged to the region, and whose particular interests would be principally served by the province’s creation. However, this exclusivist sense of belonging was not unique to western India. In fact, during a tumultuous transition in which other borders and boundaries were being frequently envisaged, contested and shaped, various vocabularies of freedom similarly privileged exclusivist notions of belonging on the basis of majoritarian claims. The history of the Samyukta Maharashtra demand, then, provides further insights into belonging and citizenship in South Asia as a whole, as these came to be interlinked with prevailing conceptions of community, on the one hand, and new ideas about democracy and democratic conduct, on the other, during the late colonial and early postcolonial period. Demands for linguistic reorganisation and Pakistan were in part premised and found fruition on the basis of the majority status of particular ‘communities’ – whether linguistic or religious – in certain provincial sub-units of the subcontinent. Since the early nineteenth century, the colonial state had accorded centrality to community, rather than the individual, as the basic unit of Indian social organisation. What began as one more means through which to distinguish ‘backward’ colonised societies in South Asia from the superior ‘modernity’ of the Western coloniser became an increasingly commonplace Orientalist assumption, which in turn informed a range of legal and administrative measures and practices introduced in British India.1 These measures, and the premises upon which they were based, were used by the colonial state to maintain social order and justify colonial power. But at certain moments and conjunctures, it also proved politically salient for various members of Indian society to engage with, draw upon and reorient such prevailing ideas about South Asia’s inherent communitarianism, as they aligned with their own particular interests and purposes.

168

Conclusion

By the interwar period, these ideas about the centrality of community had come to be politicised, in the novel context of an expanding franchise and the gradual democratisation of representative government at the provincial level. Although the GOI reforms of 1919 and 1935 were ostensibly framed around ideas of equality and individual rights, they privileged community by continuing separate electorates and reserved seats. Equally, although members of Indian society engaged with liberal democratic ideals, these were most frequently perceived as useful avenues to tackle the inequalities and exploitation faced by disadvantaged communities, now reimagined as constituencies.2 In western India, such rhetoric became central to an increasingly vocal non-Brahman movement, which demanded increased representation in the legislature and civil service to compensate the community for its apparent ‘backwardness’, particularly when compared and contrasted with the region’s Brahmans.3 But these claims were by no means unique to Maharashtra and Marathi speakers – in Kannada-speaking parts of Bombay, and in the various parts of the Madras Presidency, similar claims were made on behalf of local nonBrahman groups.4 Simultaneously, Muslims, Dalits and a whole host of other communities, defined on the basis of their distinction from an elite group of high-caste Hindus (who tended to dominate the already limited educational, bureaucratic and legislative opportunities provided for Indians by the state), also claimed recognition as distinct communities deserving of political recognition. What was perceived to distinguish the claims of non-Brahmans, and at least some Muslims, from those made by other communities was the fact that these groups constituted a majority of the population in certain administrative units. Since the introduction of the decennial all-India census in the late nineteenth century, communities had been counted and categorised by the state on the basis of their majority or minority status. At the all-India level, these demographic ratios were primarily framed on the basis of Hindu majority and Muslim minority, through which the British justified their position in India as a ‘neutral arbiter’ between two supposedly irreconcilable religious communities. In this telling, Muslims required special dispensation in the political arena to compensate them for their lack of numbers. However, at the provincial level, other notions of majority and minority were constructed. In Bengal and Punjab, for example, this binary between Hindu majority and Muslim minority was reversed.5 In this context, the devolution of power to the provinces in a gradually democratising system was not lost on those representing Muslim interests. It is striking that Jinnah was reportedly prepared to give up separate electorates in negotiations preceding the Nehru Report of 1928, in return for proportional representation in these provinces, as well as the creation of a separate Muslim-majority province in Sind.6 The demand for Sind can be perceived as a precursor to both the creation of Pakistan and the wholesale reorganisation of administrative boundaries in Bombay, including the roughly coterminous claims to create the provinces of Karnataka and Maharashtra. All were in part premised on the territorialisation of number: the idea of creating semi-autonomous administrative units for communities who constituted demographic majorities in particular parts of the Indian subcontinent. Like Muslims in Bengal and Punjab, Marathi-speaking non-Brahmans, many of whom

Conclusion

169

increasingly employed the term Maratha to describe themselves, made up a majority of the population in many of the districts of western India. And like the interests of Muslims in Muslim-majority provinces, their claims to representation shifted during the interwar period, away from commensuration, and towards a conception of democracy as an exercise in provincial majoritarianism instead. This, as Chapter 2 made clear, was perhaps most evident in the support for the termination of reserved seats for ‘Marathas and Allied Castes’ under the 1935 GOI Act, which were considered as no longer necessary, particularly as more Marathas were now being incorporated within the electorate. Unlike the demand for Pakistan, though, provincial majoritarianism in western India could be fused with ideas about the Hindu character of the Indian nation, on the one hand, and prevailing elements within the Congress organisation, on the other. In part, this coincided with a vision of Maratha history, initially conceived by Brahmans but embraced increasingly by Marathas as a ‘martial race’, that the pre-colonial Marathas were both the protectors and prototypes of the wider Indian (Hindu) nation.7 The proponents of Samyukta Maharashtra were keen to stress that the demand for linguistic reorganisation was not meant to challenge larger loyalties to the Indian nation, but instead enhance them through patriotic devotion to the region as one part of the wider whole. The linkages drawn between Maratha and Hindu majoritarianism were evident in responses to the Communal Award of 1932, when the concern that separate electorates and/or reserved seats for Dalits would diminish the representation of ‘General’ (read ‘Hindu’) constituencies within the provincial assemblies was shared amongst Hindus, both across India and between castes. In Maharashtra, it provided a commonality of interest and semi-détente in hostilities between Brahmans and non-Brahmans that encouraged the integration of Marathas into the Congress, ultimately paving the way for their capture of the provincial organisation by the late 1930s. As Chapter 4 then went on to suggest, the shifting powerbase within the Maharashtra PCC encouraged the view amongst provincial Congressmen that democracy should be equated with provisions and representation for the majority community within particular constituencies. This was evident in the decision to privilege the selection of Marathi speakers and Marathas as Congress candidates ahead of the 1951–1952 provincial elections. Many of these candidates also supported linguistic reorganisation, despite the ambivalence of Congressmen at the centre. In fact, support for Samyukta Maharashtra amongst provincial Congressmen points to the ways in which Nehru’s personal conceptions of democracy and secularism failed to permeate the party. Within provincial governments and the provincial Congress, party and state representatives tended to eschew Nehruvianism and adopt their own ideas about democracy instead, often based around the protection of majoritarian community interests. These developments were not unique to Maharashtra. Some of the best-known politicians of the era, including Vallabhbhai Patel, Rajendra Prasad and Govind Ballabh Pant, engaged with communal rhetoric to question the loyalties of India’s remaining Muslim minority.8 In Hyderabad, Delhi and West Bengal, for example, Muslims were subject to pre-emptive arrests, had their rights to property restricted as potential ‘evacuees’ and were dispersed

170

Conclusion

from border areas and ghettoised.9 Likewise, during debates between administrators and ministers in Bombay shortly before and immediately after partition, it was decided that the proportion of Muslims in the police, was ‘so high in some districts that it is necessary to recruit only Hindus and non-Muslims for at least three years in order to bring down the proportion to a proper level’.10 In the context of the supposedly questionable loyalties of the Muslim minority, members of the provincial home department justified this recommendation ‘as a security measure’.11 This active discrimination went one step further than the relatively peripheral status accorded to Muslims in recruitment to the provincial services in Bombay before the Second World War, as discussed in Chapter 5. Now, rather than having to compete with all other ‘Intermediate’ classes for appointments to the services, in which their relatively low numbers made it difficult not to be swamped by nonBrahman interests, the provincial government now took additional steps to disallow outright their candidature. But because majoritarianism in Maharashtra also came to be oriented around language and caste, it also had a detrimental impact on additional ‘minority’ groups. Some of the communities who felt most threatened by the plan for Samyukta Maharashtra were linguistic minorities – Gujarati, Kannada and Sindhi speakers. As Chapter 2 revealed, Gujarati businessmen became increasingly concerned about the prospect of Bombay City being included in a new Marathi-speaking province. After a spate of violent attacks against Gujarati speakers during the winter of 1955–1956, K. M. Munshi was so alarmed that he drew comparisons between the Hindu exodus from Lahore and a potential Gujarati migration out of Bombay.12 Equally, Chapter 6 considered the concerns of Kannada-speaking minorities in Marathi-majority districts such as Sholapur in the context of census enumeration in 1951. A letter from two prominent members of the local Kannadaspeaking community, N. B. Kadadi and M. S. Sirdar, demonstrated how accusations about census officials tampering with the returns on mother tongue were particularly important ahead of an impending linguistic reorganisation in western India. These concerns were also replicated in the context of the provincial elections of 1951–1952, when Hindu refugees from Sind contacted Nehru about their inability ‘to secure representation on the Bombay State Legislature’.13 For the former secretary of the Congress Party in the Sind Legislative Assembly, Parsram V. Tahilramani, this was part of a broader malaise experienced by Sindhi refugees in Bombay: ‘In other words, we displaced persons from Sind are, even after four years of domicile in Bombay, an unwelcome distinct group if not aliens and outcastes’.14 All of these incidents demonstrate the synergies between linguistic reorganisation in western India, on the one hand, and a wider maelstrom of ‘provincialisation’ and sub-federal demands, on the other, of which the demand for Pakistan was only one part. The spectre of partition, for example, was also evident in Munshi’s anxieties about Gujarati migration, in which new territories were considered as intrinsically tied up with one particular community. Meanwhile, concerns about the validity of the 1951 Census in Bombay ahead of linguistic reorganisation replicated similar problems with the returns in northeast and northwest India in 1941, in the context of the Lahore Resolution of the previous year. And finally, hostilities

Conclusion

171

towards outsiders on the basis of linguistic or provincial notions of citizenship were also apparent in Sind and West Bengal, where Urdu-speaking Muslim refugees received a similarly hostile reception. Like Sindhi-speaking Hindus in Bombay, these shaped refugees’ sense of belonging within their new homes.15 The ways in which these appeals were framed is also worthy of note. All three were organised on the basis of representing particular community interests. The demand made by Tahilramani, in particular, shows how one of the strategies employed by linguistic minorities when they approached the state was to align the idea of democracy with commensuration, in which additional or special representation would be accorded to disadvantaged communities to equalise their status vis-à-vis the dominant/numerically preponderate ‘Other’. His demands for representation of Sindhi refugee interests in the Bombay Legislative Assembly, out of all proportion to the relatively small size of the Sindhi population in the province, replicated at least the form taken by separate electorates and reserved seats for Muslims and Dalits in the interwar period. Yet, conscious of the new postcolonial government’s desire to transcend the politics of community under Nehru, Tahilramani also emphasised that his letter should not be taken as representative of ‘communal or parochial considerations or . . . separatist or isolationist tendencies’.16 In this sense, Tahilramani’s note paralleled concurrent efforts by Muslims in early postcolonial India to avoid ‘communal’ and ‘separatist’ politics. By holding themselves to a higher secular standard, they looked to align themselves with an idealised form of democratic Nehruvianism.17 Attempts to balance non-discrimination and commensuration point towards a contradiction at the heart of Nehruvian conceptions of democracy, as explored in this book. On the one hand, Nehru presided over the abolition of data on religion and caste at the census, oversaw the end of separate electorates and reserved seats for religious communities, and worried about the parochial tendencies evident within the demands for linguistic reorganisation. This was part of a wider attempt to overcome ‘primordial’ religious affinities by emphasising economic modernisation and social egalitarianism. On the other hand, Nehru was reluctant to entirely abandon the politics of community, as he remained committed to ensuring the party represented minority interests. As Chapter 4 demonstrated, Nehru personally recommended that chairmen of provincial election committees do all in their power to select individuals from minority communities as Congress candidates. In Bombay, he contacted Morarji Desai to criticise the list of potential Congress candidates provided by the Bombay PCC, and advocated for the nomination of Abid Ali, a local Muslim Congressman. Just as Tahilramani was concerned about how his petition might be interpreted, Nehru’s desire that the selection of Congress candidates be partly based on their community identity opened the party up to criticism over its claims to communal impartiality in the democratic process. Finally, the appeals made on behalf of linguistic minorities in Maharashtra also engaged with a particular conception of the state, divided between its ‘sublime’ and ‘profane’ dimensions.18 Kadadi and Sirdar appealed to B. G. Kher, as Chief Minister of Bombay, with regards to their accusations about the census returns in Sholapur. Tahilramani, meanwhile, petitioned Nehru to see that Sindhi refugees

172

Conclusion

were better represented in the provincial assembly. In part, this was built upon a vision of both the state and the Congress organisation that emphasised the impartiality and benevolence of its higher echelons, in contrast to the nepotism and communalism of its local representatives. As Kadadi and Sirdar’s petition suggests, the everyday state came to be knowingly or unknowingly manipulated in the interests of particular groups, as the census enumerators brought their own subjectivities to bear upon the collection of data. Whilst the higher echelons of the state were not in any way more impartial than its local representatives – see the aforementioned references to the majoritarianism of some of the leading Congressmen at the centre – the content of the appeals substantiate the argument that Nehruvian democratic ideals failed to permeate the everyday workings of both India’s administrative body and its premier political organisation. And yet, at the same time, they demonstrate that these ideals still had some purchase amongst disadvantaged individuals from minority communities within wider Indian society, who engaged with democracy as non-discrimination and/or commensuration to remind the state of its responsibilities towards them. Like Maharashtra’s linguistic minorities, the region’s caste minorities were also apprehensive about the impact provincial reorganisation would have upon their rights and status. Ostensibly, Samyukta Maharashtra would protect the interests of all Marathi speakers. But, as this book has suggested, it was often envisaged as bolstering the position of the Maratha majority, at the expense of other nonBrahman and Dalit castes. In the mid-nineteenth century, Jotirao Phule had emphasised the commonalities between non-Brahmans and Dalits, in an effort to counter the politico-religious dominance of the region’s Brahmans.19 But as opportunities for Marathas increased with the expansion and gradual democratisation of the electorate, bureaucracy and education during the interwar years, this already fragile alliance was broken. Marathas’ claims to Kshatriya status distinguished them from Dalits and other non-Brahmans in the region, whilst their capacity to dominate seats reserved for ‘Marathas and Allied Castes’ in the legislature alienated the latter, who were unable to benefit from the reforms. Equally, non-Brahmans frequently resented attempts at Dalit assertion through temple entry and access to other civic sites during the 1920s and 1930s. These tensions were predicated on the basis of distinctions between ‘touchable’ and ‘untouchable’ castes. The leading Dalit politician of the interwar years, B. R. Ambedkar, adopted a more ambivalent position than Phule, fluctuating between an emphasis on the particular status of Dalits, and the commonalities between Dalit and non-Brahman interests. Again, this ambivalence can be seen as a careful balancing act between alternate visions of a nascent democracy. On the one hand, many Dalit representatives demanded separate electorates, which would help equalise Dalit’s political inadequacies when measured against the Hindu (Maratha) majority, and take into account both their demographic minority and particularly stigmatised and materially deprived existence. On the other, Ambedkar returned to emphasising the significance of a broader alliance between non-Brahmans and Dalits during the 1930s, which would avoid divisive communal labels, and be capable of representing a variety of working-class interests across the Marathi-speaking districts. However,

Conclusion

173

Ambedkar’s attempts failed to gain much traction, and conflicts between nonBrahmans and Dalits in western India became more virulent during this period. In an effort to overcome the potential difficulties this majoritarian vision of democracy entailed for the Dalit community of Maharashtra, B. R. Ambedkar instead turned to ideas of migration and territorial separation at the moment of postcolonial transition. His plans to create four separate Marathi-speaking provinces, in which Bombay City would serve as a sanctuary for Dalits (because no community formed an outright majority in the city) was premised on his recognition that Dalits now ‘found themselves as a territorially dispersed minority with nowhere else to go’.20 Unlike the aforementioned Gujarati and Kannada speakers, Dalits were territorially dispersed across India, and in no administrative unit constituted a majority of the population. Ambedkar’s scheme was therefore not unique to Maharashtra. In fact, in the roughly coterminous context of partition, Ambedkar had argued for the creation of separate Dalit settlements, where they might themselves constitute a majority of the population. For Ambedkar, this ‘Dalitsthan’ would counter the threat posed by Hindu majoritarianism across India, of which Maratha majoritarianism could be viewed as one provincial manifestation. In this way, Ambedkar also acknowledged the territorialisation of number as critical to the recognition of different groups as separate elements within postcolonial India, despite the lack of options this gave India’s Dalit community. By analysing the critical decades that straddled the colonial/postcolonial transition, this book also provides a deeper understanding of some of the developments that have transpired in the ensuing decades. It avoids treating the initial years after independence as a period of relative stability and optimism, which can be compared favourably to the difficulties encountered during and since Indira Gandhi’s premiership. Rather than seeing Nehruvian conceptions of democracy as a set of principles and practices that generally commanded both the wider nation’s attention and devotion, it has demonstrated that ideas about democratic majoritarianism were evident (if not always explicitly acknowledged) both within the Congress party and the administration since at least the interwar years. This majoritarian ideal inflected a number of local state practices, including bureaucratic reservations at the provincial level, the selection of Congress candidates for provincial elections and the enumeration and classification of communities at the census. Equally, by broadening our understanding of the scope of majoritarianism, beyond the prevailing emphasis on religious majoritarianism so that it might also incorporate language and caste at the provincial level, this book also provides greater comprehension of other critical changes in Indian politics and society since the 1950s. In the decades since reorganisation, cultural chauvinism and provincial majoritarianism have continued to pervade Maharashtrian politics. The rise of the Shiv Sena (‘Shivaji’s Army’), for example, has seen the development of a more assertive ‘sons-of-the-soil’ ideology, which drew firmly upon exclusivist notions of belonging that were often implicit within the demands made by proponents of Samyukta Maharashtra. This anti-outsider rhetoric has a long history in Maharashtra, stretching back at least to Phule’s notion of non-Brahmans as the original inhabitants of the land. Since the 1960s, the Sena has supported acts of violence

174

Conclusion

committed against a host of ‘foreign’ elements residing in the city (Madrasis, Muslims, and, most recently, Uttar Pradeshi and Bihari migrants) and has demanded the state and private businesses in Bombay favour the recruitment of the ‘native’ over the ‘outsider’.21 At the same time, these regionalised perceptions of belonging are not restricted to Maharashtra, but have also been manifest in state policies and practices that privileged locals in Assam and Andhra Pradesh.22 Meanwhile, attempts to create new provinces continue to coalesce around particular interest groups in South Asia, with varying degrees of success. The movement’s participants have oft cited experiences of discrimination and subjugation at the hands of the provincial state and majority population in calling for a province of their own.23 The Sena has also been a vocal critic of increased assertiveness and militancy on the part of Maharashtra’s Dalit population since the 1970s. This has coincided with the formation of the Dalit Panthers, a neo-Buddhist organisation that drew upon Ambedkar’s legacy to recruit disaffected Dalit youth in Maharashtra’s urban centres, and was highly critical of the casteism of the Indian state.24 The Panthers’ challenge to caste hierarchies and values was exemplified in the burning of Hindu scriptures and the insulting of Hindu icons, thereby replicating some of the conventions adopted by Ambedkar during the interwar years. And the Sena’s violent reaction (often in collaboration with local state functionaries), which took the form of pitched street battles between Sena and Panther activists throughout the 1970s, also replicated the hostile and often violent response to Dalit assertiveness by nonBrahmans in Bombay Province during the late 1920s and early 1930s. By this period, Shiv Sena had assumed the mantle of Maratha majoritarianism that had first passed from the non-Brahman movement to the Congress organisation during the interwar years, drawing upon expressions of caste and regional pride that were previously evident within prominent elements of the Maharashtra PCC. In this way, it replicated the roughly coterminous process through which the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its affiliates assumed the mantle of Hindu majoritarianism from conservative elements within the Congress Party at the national level. Finally, Maratha assertiveness during the late colonial and early postcolonial period, particularly as it coalesced around a cohesive non-Brahman movement, might also be perceived as a harbinger for the rise of the lower castes in north India and the shift towards ‘universal backwardness’ in the late twentieth century.25 Again, this was built around the centrality of number, territory and community in a democratic context, as new organisations like the Rashtriya Janata Dal, Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party emerged in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. These parties looked to represent the interests of particular Dalit and OBC constituencies, as large voting blocs around whom political power in the province could coalesce, and supported the implementation of reservations in government jobs and state universities for OBCs in 1993. In fact, Kanshi Ram, a Dalit from the Punjab, explicitly drew upon Phule’s conception of the majority status of the lower castes when he named his new political organisation the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) during the 1980s. These tentative suggestions about the linkages between the interwar years and the first decade after independence in western India, on the one hand, and more recent political developments across India as a whole, on the other,

Conclusion

175

provide a sense of the much larger spatial and temporal framework through which a history of majoritarianism in India now needs to be explored. The central objective of this study has been to provide a more all-encompassing perspective on the postcolonial transition in South Asia in the context of ideas about belonging, citizenship and democracy. In some sense, the demands for Pakistan and Samyukta Maharashtra were both expressions of a variety of ideas about sub-national autonomy and federalism within postcolonial India. It was considered that their creation would best protect and provide for the interests of those that ‘intrinsically’ belonged to these new administrative units. This sense of belonging was articulated through various demands made upon the state by its citizens, which also engaged with majoritarian ideas about democracy and democratic conduct somewhat (but not entirely) at odds with the emphasis on communal impartiality favoured by Nehru and his supporters at the centre. Provincial state practitioners and the provincial Congress organisation came to imbibe elements of these communal ideas and perspectives, and applied them informally to their policies and practices in relation to affirmative action in provincial government services, census enumeration and the selection of Congress candidates for the provincial legislature. But they also could, on occasion, present their actions as adhering to an alternative logic of democratic conduct, which rejected the recognition of minority rights through forms of commensuration, and foreshadowed the Hindu nationalist critique of such policies as a form of ‘pseudosecularism’. In this telling, true secularism at the provincial level in western India, epitomised by non-discrimination in the democratic process, would ultimately favour the Marathas (or, more broadly, the Marathi speakers), because they often constituted the majority of the local population. A sense of the perceived benefits brought by the twin imperatives of provincialisation and democratisation to particular ‘community’ interests in interwar British India helps explain the aforementioned willingness amongst Marathas to give up reserved seats in the provincial legislative assembly at this time. Yet, as a result of these particular practices and conceptions of democratic conduct at the provincial level, ‘minority’ communities in what would become Maharashtra – whether identified as Adivasis, Dalits, Muslims, Gujaratis or Kannadas – increasingly found their opportunities circumscribed and their claims to belonging in the region invalidated. One of the strategies they adopted to counter this threat was to implore politicians at the centre, particularly Nehru, to intervene in the interests of upholding India’s secular pretensions. Yet, in reality, the sheer scale of India’s convoluted administrative system ensured the extent to which Nehru was able to preside over and police provincial manifestations of the party, and the everyday functioning of the state, was always rather limited. As a result, the potentially precarious position of such individuals within a proposed Maharashtrian province was not so easily resolved. Indeed, the brief forays into the history of more recent decades in western India, contained within this chapter, have shown that a sense of unease amongst Maharashtra’s minorities has not disappeared since linguistic reorganisation, but has often been amplified by subsequent developments.

176

Conclusion

Notes 1 Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001; Rachel Sturman, The Government of Social Life in Colonial India: Liberalism, Religious Law, and Women’s Rights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. 2 Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009, pp. 18–20. 3 Cf. Gail Omvedt, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non-Brahman Movement in Western India, 1873 to 1930, Bombay: Scientific Socialist Education Trust, 1976, Chapter 10. 4 Eugene Irschick, Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahman Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916–1929, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. 5 Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 2. 6 Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947, New Delhi: Macmillan, 2002 [1983], p. 262. 7 Christopher A. Bayly, Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 43–44; Sumit Guha, ‘Transitions and Translations: Regional Power and Vernacular Identity in the Dakhan, 1500–1800’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 24.2 (2004), 23–31 (p. 29); Véronique Bénéï, Schooling Passions: Nation, History, and Language in Contemporary Western India, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008, p. 166. 8 See, for example, Vallabhbhai Patel, ‘Enclosure: Note for the Cabinet’, in Sardar Patel’s Correspondence, Volume IV, ed. by Durga Das, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1971, pp. 365–366. 9 Taylor Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India: Negotiating Citizenship in Postcolonial Hyderabad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, Chapter Two; Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, Chapters 3 and 4; Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, Chapter 4. 10 Mumbai, Maharashtra State Archives [henceforth MSA], Government of Bombay [henceforth GOB], Home Department File 3268/5 I, ‘Home Department Note’, 9 July 1947. 11 Ibid., ‘Home Department Note’, 2 September 1947. 12 New Delhi, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library [henceforth NMML], K. M. Munshi Papers, Roll 70, File 200 (1956), ‘Letter from K.M. Munshi to Jawaharlal Nehru’, 29 April 1956. 13 Ibid., All-India Congress Committee [henceforth AICC] Papers, Part II, File 3034 (1952), ‘Letter from Parsram V. Tahilramani to Jawaharlal Nehru’, 1 March 1952. 14 Ibid. 15 Sarah Ansari, ‘Partition, Migration and Refugees: Responses to the Arrival of Muhajirs in Sind during 1947–1948’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 18 (1995), 95–108; Zamindar, The Long Partition, Chapter 2; Umm-e-Ummara, ‘More Sinned against Than Sinning’, in Stories about the Partition of India, Volume I, ed. by Alok Bhalla, New Delhi: Manohar, 2013 [1994], pp. 101–117. 16 NMML, AICC Papers, Part II, File 3034, ‘Letter from Tahilramani to Nehru’. 17 Sherman, Muslim Belonging in Secular India; Mushirul Hasan, Legacy of a Divided Nation: India’s Muslims since Independence, Boulder: Westview Press, 1997. 18 Thomas Blom Hansen, ‘Governance and Myths of the State in Mumbai’, in The Everyday State and Society in Modern India, ed. by Chris J. Fuller and Véronique Bénéï, London: Hurst and Company, 2001, pp. 31–67; Akhil Gupta, ‘Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State’, American Ethnologist, 22 (1995), 375–402 (p. 390).

Conclusion

177

19 Rosalind O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 [2002]. 20 Rao, The Caste Question, p. 159. 21 Mary F. Katzenstein, Ethnicity and Equality: The Shiv Sena Party and Preferential Policies in Bombay, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979; Thomas Blom Hansen, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, pp. 45–48. 22 Myron Weiner, Sons of the Soil: Migration and Ethnic Conflict in India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. 23 Louise Tillin, Remapping India: New States and Their Political Origins, London: Hurst and Company, 2013. 24 Rao, The Caste Question, pp. 188–190. 25 Christophe Jaffrelot, India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India, London: Hurst and Company, 2003; Susan Bayly, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, Chapter 7.

Glossary

abhang Hindu devotional hymn adivasi ‘tribal’ groups, meaning the ‘original inhabitants’ of India ahir cow-herding caste of relatively low status, traditionally from north India ati-shudra another term used to describe Dalits or ‘untouchables’ avatar earthly incarnation of a Hindu deity bahujan samaj ‘people in the majority’; refers to people of low-caste origin bania occupational caste of traders, merchants, bankers and moneylenders bhakti form of devotional worship, which in its most radical manifestations takes the form of an anti-caste egalitarianism directed against the intercession of Brahman priests bhat Brahman caste surname; also used by non-Brahmans as derogatory term for a Brahman priest bhil adivasi people who generally follow agricultural occupations brahman highest varna in the fourfold varna scheme; traditionally priests, but now also involved in governmental, landowning and entrepreneurial occupations and activities chhatrapati literally ‘paramount sovereign’ chitpavan brahman sub-caste originally from the Konkan, western Maharashtra daivadnya brahman sub-caste originally from coastal Maharashtra, Karnataka and Goa daldi Muslim community who traditionally work as fishermen dalit literally ‘ground’, ‘suppressed’, ‘broken to pieces’; preferred designation of former ‘untouchables’ desh native land; region; nation dhangar occupational caste of shepherds located primarily in Maharashtra dharma religious and moral ‘natural’ law gabit occupational caste of fishermen located primarily in Maharashtra goonda thug, gang member harijan literally ‘child of God’; Gandhian term for dalits/‘untouchables’ Jain follower of Jainism, South Asian religion that originally developed out of protest against caste restrictions within Hinduism, but now often operates like a separate caste group

180 jati

Glossary

literally ‘birth’, ‘name’, ‘breed’, ‘order’; caste in the sense of a specific named ‘birth-group’ kanbi Gujarati ‘peasant’ caste title kayastha predominantly north Indian caste involved in scribal occupations koli adivasi caste group, found in north western and western India kshatriya second highest varna in the fourfold varna scheme; traditionally occupied in lordly/kingly and martial pastimes kshetra land; field; place kulkarni brahman village book-keeper of Maharashtra kunbi Marathi ‘peasant’ caste title; closely linked to Maratha caste lingayat caste title of Kannada-speaking ‘peasant’ population with distinctive Shaivite sectarian religious tradition mahar dalit caste group from Maharashtra, who traditionally perform menial tasks, but who were also employed as military servicemen throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries mali occupational caste of gardeners and flower growers mamlatdar administrative heads of sub-districts mang dalit caste group from Maharashtra and other parts of western India, who traditionally perform range of menial tasks (e.g. leather curers, undertakers) manusmriti ancient Hindu legal text; held responsible for the caste system in modern India by B. R. Ambedkar maratha caste title of superior ‘peasants’ and warriors in Maharashtra with traditions of arms-bearing and privileged land rights marathmola range of ‘customs’ employed by ‘genuine’ Marathas, primarily directed at the seclusion of women, to distinguish themselves as Kshatriyas from other non-Brahman (Shudra) castes marwari Indian ethnic group that originate from Rajasthan, traditionally involved in business enterprises mela literally ‘gathering’, ‘fair’; applied to a range of events and festivities in the Indian subcontinent mofussil rural hinterland pandit brahman religious scholar with knowledge of classical Hindu scriptures Parsi ethnic Persian member of Zoroastrian religious communities in India patidar caste title of superior ‘peasant’ tillers in Gujarat pavada ballads peshwa ‘prime minister’ of the Maratha polity in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries puranas range of ancient Hindu texts, primarily in Sanskrit purdah practice of secluding women, evident amongst both Hindu and Muslim communities in western India samyukta connected together; joined; united satyagraha literally ‘truth force’; Gandhian non-violent/civil resistance shudra lowest of the orders defined in the fourfold varna scheme; traditionally peasant or occupational castes

Glossary

181

sonar occupational caste of goldsmiths swadeshi literally ‘own country’; home industry; early twentieth-century nationalist campaigns featuring boycott of British goods swaraj ‘self-governance’, ‘self-rule’, ‘home rule’; synonymous with Gandhi’s anti-colonial nationalist campaign taluka sub-district; small unit of administration below the district tamasha show, performance, celebration, commonly involving dance; a fuss or commotion varna literally ‘colour’, ‘rank’, ‘class’; the idealised fourfold scheme of ranked human callings or orders as set out in ancient Hindu scriptures

Bibliography

Official records Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai Home Department Home (Special) Department Political and Services Department Reforms Office

National Archives of India, New Delhi Home Department Reforms Office

Oriental and India Office Records, the British Library, London Commission, Committee and Conference Records

Private and institutional papers Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi All India Congress Committee Papers Bombay Pradesh Congress Committee Papers Indian Merchant Chamber Papers K.M. Munshi Papers N.V. Gadgil Papers Purushottamdas Thakurdas Papers Shankarrao Deo Papers U.N. Dhebar Papers

Oriental and India Office Library, the British Library, London Lumley Collection

Bibliography 183

Newspapers Blitz (Bombay) Bombay Chronicle (Bombay) Bombay Sentinel (Bombay) Harijan (Ahmedabad) The Hindustan Times (Delhi) The Telegraph (Calcutta) Times of India (Bombay)

Administrative reports and printed primary sources All Parties Conference, The Nehru Report: An Anti-Separatist Manifesto, New Delhi: Michiko and Panjathan, 1975 [1928]. Ambedkar, Bhimrao R., Maharashtra as a Linguistic Province: Statement Submitted to the Linguistic Provinces Commission, Bombay: Thacker and Company Limited, 1948. Ambedkar, Bhimrao R., Pakistan or the Partition of India, Bombay: Thackers Publishers, 1946. Ambedkar, Bhimrao R., Thoughts on Linguistic States, New Delhi: Anand Sahitya Sadan, 1955. Backward Classes Commission, Government of India, Report of the Backward Classes Commission, New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1956. Betham, Robert M., Handbook for the Indian Army: Marathas and Dekhani Musalmans Compiled under the Orders of the Government of India, Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1908. Bombay Citizens’ Committee, Memorandum Submitted to the States Reorganisation Commission by Bombay Citizens’ Committee, Bombay: n.p., 1954. Bombay Legislative Assembly, Bombay Legislative Assembly Debates, Bombay: n.p., 1938–1960 Bombay Pradesh Congress Committee, Hands off Bombay: A Plea for Unity and “First Things First”, Bombay: Bombay Pradesh Congress Committee, 1954. Bowman, J. B., Census of India, 1951: Language Handbook: Dangs, Thana and Banaskantha Districts, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1955. Bowman, J. B., Census of India, 1951: Language Handbooks: Sholapur, Satara South, Bijapur and Kolhapur Districts, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1955. Bowman, J. B., Census of India, 1951, Volume IV: Bombay, Saurashtra and Kutch, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1953. Campbell, James M., and Reginald E. Enthoven, Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Calcutta: Government Central Press, 1899. Committee Appointed by the Government of Bombay for a Programme of Educational Expansion, Report of the Committee Appointed by the Government of Bombay for a Programme of Educational Expansion in the Adivasi Areas of the Thana District, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1948. Committee for West Khandesh District Backward Area Education, Report of Survey Committee for West Khandesh District Backward Area Education, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1954. Dantwala, Mohanlal L., C. L. Gheewala, and C. N. Vakil, Future of Bombay: A Rejoinder to B.R. Ambedkar, Bombay: Bombay Chronicle, 1948.

184

Bibliography

Deccan Riots (Richey) Commission, 1875, Appendix A: Papers Relating to the Indebtedness of the Agricultural Classes in Bombay and Other Parts of India, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1876. Depressed Classes and Aboriginal Tribes Committee, Bombay Presidency, Report of the Depressed Classes and Aboriginal Tribes Committee, Bombay Presidency, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1930. Director of Publicity, Government of Maharashtra, Maharashtra State Is Launched: An Artist’s Review of the Events That Marked the Formation of the State April 27–May 1, 1960, Bombay: Rekha Publications, 1960. Divatia, Harsidhbhai, Linguistic Limits of Maha Gujarat, Bombay: Gujarat Research Society, 1948. Dracup, A. H., and Herbert T. Sorley, Census of India, 1931, Volume VIII: Bombay Presidency, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1933. Election Commission of India, Statistical Report on General Elections, 1951 to the Legislative Assembly of Bombay, New Delhi: Election Commission of India, n.d. Enthoven, Reginald E., Census of India, 1901, Volume IX-B: Bombay Presidency, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1902. Enthoven, Reginald E., The Tribes and Castes of Bombay, 3 volumes, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1920–1922. Gadgil, Dhananjay R., The Federal Problem in India, Poona: Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, 1947. Gadgil, Dhananjay R., Federating India, Poona: Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, 1945. Government of India, The Constitution of India, New Delhi: Ministry of Law and Justice, 2015. Government of India, Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms, Calcutta, India: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1918. Government of India, Ministry of Home Affairs, Memorandum on the Report of the Backward Classes Commission, New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1956. His Majesty’s Government, Report of the Indian Statutory Commission, London: n.p., 1930. Indian Merchants’ Chamber, Bombay, Memorandum Submitted by the Committee of the Chamber to the States Reorganisation Commission, Bombay: India Printing Works, 1954. Indian Statutory Commission, Simon Commission Report on India (Indian Statutory Commission), Volume VII: Memorandum Submitted by the Government of Bombay, London: H.M.S.O, 1930. Linguistic Provinces Commission, Report of the Linguistic Provinces Commission 1948, New Delhi: Government of India Press, 1948. Linguistics Provinces Commission, Report of the Linguistic Provinces Committee, Appointed by the Jaipur Congress, December, 1948, New Delhi: Indian National Congress, 1949. Maharashtra Ekikaran Samiti, Belgaum, Belgaum City: Integral Part of Maharashtra: Memorandum Submitted to the States Reorganisation Commission by the Maharashtra Ekikaran Samiti, Belgaum, Poona: P.R. Damdhere, n.d. Molesworth, James, Marathi-English Dictionary, Bombay: Bombay Education Society’s Press, 1857. Office of the Registrar General and Census Commissioner, Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, ‘A-2: Decadal Variation in Population Since 1901’, available at http://

Bibliography 185 www.censusindia.gov.in/2011census/PCA/A-2_Data_Tables/27%20A-2%20Maharastra. pdf [last accessed 28 November 2017]. Ranade, Mahadev G., Rise of the Maratha Power, Bombay: Punalekar and Company, 1900. The Reforms Committee (Franchise), Evidence Taken before the Reforms Committee (Franchise), Volume II: Bengal, Madras, Bombay, Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1919. Risley, Herbert H., and Edward A. Gait, Census of India, 1901, Volume I: India, Calcutta, India: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1903. Samyukta Maharashtra Parishad, Maharashtra’s Case before the Linguistic Provinces Commission, Poona: Samyukta Maharashtra Parishad/M.H. Patwardhan at the Sangam Press, 1948. Samyukta Maharashtra Parishad, Reorganisation of States in India with Particular Reference to the Formation of Maharashtra, Bombay: Topiwalla Mansion, 1954. Sedgwick, L. J., Census of India, 1921, Volume VIII: Bombay Presidency, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1922. Sorley, Herbert T., Census of India, 1931, Volume IX: The Cities of Bombay Presidency, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1933. States Reorganisation Commission, Report of the States Reorganisation Commission,1955, New Delhi: The Manager, Government of India Press, 1955. Symington, David C., Report on the Aboriginal and Hill Tribes of the Partially Excluded Areas in the Province of Bombay, Bombay: Government Central Press, 1938. Tilak, Bal G., The Arctic Home in the Vedas, Being Also a New Key to the Interpretation of Many Vedic Texts and Legends, Poona: Messrs Tilak Brothers, 1903.

Collections of published documents Ahmad, Jamil-ud-Din, ed., Some Recent Speeches and Writings of Mr. Jinnah, Lahore: Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1942. Bhalla, Alok, ed., Stories about the Partition of India, 3 volumes, New Delhi: Manohar, 2013 [1994]. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Electronic Book), 98 volumes, New Delhi: Publications Division, Government of India, 1999. Das, Durga, ed., Sardar Patel’s Correspondence, 1945–1950, 10 volumes, Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1971–1974. Gopal, Sarvepalli, ed., Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series, New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1984. Moon, Vasant, N. G. Kamble, M. L. Kasare, and Ashok Godghate, eds., Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches, 17 volumes, New Delhi: Dr. Ambedkar Foundation, 2014 [1979–2003].

Books, articles and unpublished theses Ahmad, Irfan, Islamism and Democracy in India: The Transformation of Jamaat-e-Islami, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Aiyar, Sana, ‘Fazlul Huq, Region and Religion in Bengal: The Forgotten Alternative of 1940–1943’, Modern Asian Studies, 42 (2008), 1213–1249. Ansari, Sarah, Life after Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh, 1947–1962, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

186

Bibliography

Ansari, Sarah, ‘Partition, Migration and Refugees: Responses to the Arrival of Muhajirs in Sind during 1947–1948’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 18 (1995), 95–108. Appadurai, Arjun, ‘Number in the Colonial Imagination’, in Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. by Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993, pp. 314–339. Attwood, Donald W., Raising Cane: The Political Economy of Sugar in Western India, Boulder: Westview Press, 1992. Bajpai, Rochana, Debating Difference: Group Rights and Liberal Democracy in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011. Baker, Christopher J., and David A. Washbrook, South India: Political Institutions and Political Change 1880–1947, New Delhi: Macmillan, 1976. Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar, ‘Transfer of Power and the Crisis of Dalit Politics in India, 1945– 1947’, Modern Asian Studies, 34 (2000), 893–942. Banerjee, Mukulika, ‘Elections as Communitas’, Social Research, 78.1 (2011), 75–98. Banerjee, Sukanya, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Bate, Bernard, Tamil Oratory and the Dravidian Aesthetic: Democratic Practice in South India, New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Bayly, Christopher A., Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India 1780–1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Bayly, Christopher A., Origins of Nationality in South Asia: Patriotism and Ethical Government in the Making of Modern India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. Bayly, Susan, ‘Caste and “Race” in the Colonial Ethnography of India’, in The Concept of Race in South Asia, ed. by Peter Robb, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995, pp. 165–218. Bayly, Susan, Caste, Society and Politics in India from the Eighteenth Century to the Modern Age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Bayly, Susan, Saints, Goddesses and Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society 1700–1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Bénéï, Véronique, Schooling Passions: Nation, History, and Language in Contemporary Western India, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. Blair, Harry W., ‘Caste and the British Census in Bihar: Using Old Data to Study Contemporary Political Behaviour’, in The Census in British India: New Perspectives, ed. by Norman Gerald Barrier, New Delhi: Manohar, 1981, pp. 151–175. Bose, Neilesh, ‘Purba Pakistan Zindabad: Bengali Visions of Pakistan, 1940–1947’, Modern Asian Studies, 48 (2014), 1–36. Bose, Sugata, ‘Nation as Mother: Representations and Contestations of “India” in Bengali Literature and Culture’, in Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India, ed. by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 50–75. Brass, Paul R., ‘Factionalism and the Congress Party in Uttar Pradesh’, Asian Survey, 4 (1964), 1037–1047. Brown, Judith, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004 [1994]. Brubaker, Rogers, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, Cambridge, MA: University of Harvard Press, 1992. Carras, Mary C., The Dynamics of Indian Political Factions: A Study of District Councils in the State of Maharashtra, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.

Bibliography 187 Carter, Anthony T., Elite Politics in Rural India: Political Stratification and Political Alliances in Western Maharashtra, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Cashman, Richard I., The Myth of the Lokamanya: Tilak and Mass Politics in Maharashtra, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Chakravarti, Uma, Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai, New Delhi: Zubaan, 1998. Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan, ‘Customs of Governance: Colonialism and Democracy in Twentieth-Century India’, Modern Asian Studies, 41 (2007), 441–470. Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan, The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Chatterjee, Partha, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Chatterji, Joya, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Chatterji, Joya, ‘Partition Studies: Prospects and Pitfalls’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 73.2 (2014), 309–312. Chatterji, Joya, ‘South Asian Histories of Citizenship, 1946–1970’, The Historical Journal, 55 (2012), 1049–1071. Chatterji, Joya, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947–1967, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Chiriyankandath, James, ‘Democracy under the Raj: Elections and Separate Representations in British India’, in Democracy in India, ed. by Niraja Gopal Jayal, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 53–81. Cohn, Bernard S., ed., An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988. Cohn, Bernard S., Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Conlon, Frank F., ‘The Census of India as a Source for the Historical Study of Religion and Caste’, in The Census in British India: New Perspectives, ed. by Norman Gerald Barrier, New Delhi: Manohar, 1981, pp. 103–117. Copland, Ian, ‘The Maharaja of Kolhapur and the Non-Brahmin Movement, 1902–1910’, Modern Asian Studies, 7 (1973), 209–225. Copland, Ian, The Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire 1917–1947, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Dalmia, Vasudha, The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra and Nineteenth-Century Banaras, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. Datta, Pradip Kumar, ‘Dying Hindus: Production of Hindu Communal Common-Sense in Early Twentieth-Century Bengal’, Economic and Political Weekly, 28 (1993), 1305–1319. Deshpande, Prachi, ‘Caste as Maratha: Social Categories, Colonial Policy and Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Maharashtra’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 41 (2004), 7–34. Deshpande, Prachi, Creative Pasts: Historical Memory and Identity in Western India, 1700–1960, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Devji, Faisal, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Dhulipala, Venkat, Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

188

Bibliography

Dirks, Nicholas, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Divekar, Vasudev D., ‘The Emergence of an Indigenous Business Class in Maharashtra in the Eighteenth Century’, Modern Asian Studies, 16 (1982), 427–443. Epstein, S.J.M., The Earthy Soil: Bombay Peasants and the Indian Nationalist Movement 1919–1947, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988. Ernst, Waltraud, and Biswamoy Pati, ‘People, Princes and Colonialism’, in India’s Princely States: Peoples, Princes and Colonialism, ed. by Waltraud Ernst and Biswamoy Pati, London: Routledge, 2007, pp. 1–14. Feldhaus, Anne, The Religious System of the Mahanabhuva Sect: The Mahanabhuva Sutrapatha, New Delhi: Ramesh Jain, 1983. Fuller, Chris J., The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society in India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Fuller, Chris J., and John Harriss, ‘For an Anthropology of the Modern Indian State’, in The Everyday State and Society in Modern India, ed. by Chris J. Fuller and Véronique Bénéï, London: Hurst and Company, 2001, pp. 1–30. Galanter, Marc, Competing Equalities: Law and the Backward Classes in India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Gallagher, John, Gordon Johnson, and Anil Seal, eds., Locality, Province and Nation: Essays on Indian Politics 1870 to 1940, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Gallagher, John, and Anil Seal, ‘Britain and India between the Wars’, Modern Asian Studies, 15 (1981), 355–368. Gilmartin, David, ‘The Historiography of India’s Partition: Between Civilization and Modernity’, Journal of Asian Studies, 74.1 (2015), 23–41. Gilmartin, David, ‘The Paradox of Patronage and the People’s Sovereignty’, in Patronage as Politics in South Asia, ed. by Anastasia Piliavsky, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 125–153. Gilmartin, David, ‘Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative’, Journal of Asian Studies, 57 (1998), 1068–1095. Godsmark, Oliver, ‘Citizenship, Reservations and the Regional Alternative in the All-India Services, ca. 1928–1950’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 38 (2015), 156–170. Gordon, Stewart, The Marathas, 1600–1818, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Gore, Madhav S., The Non-Bramhan Movement in Maharashtra, New Delhi: Segment Book Distributors, 1989. Gorman, Daniel, Imperial Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Gould, William, Bureaucracy, Community and Influence in India: Society and the State, 1930s–1960s, London: Routledge, 2011. Gould, William, ‘Contesting Secularism in Colonial and Postcolonial North India between the 1930s and 1950s’, Contemporary South Asia, 14 (2005), 481–494. Gould, William, ‘“The Dual State: The Unruly Subordinate”, Caste, Community and Civil Service Recruitment in North India, 1930–1955’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 20 (2007), 13–43. Gould, William, Religion and Conflict in Modern South Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Gould, William, ‘The U.P. Congress and “Hindu Unity”: Untouchables and the Minority Question in the 1930s’, Modern Asian Studies, 39 (2005), 845–860.

Bibliography 189 Gould, William, Taylor C. Sherman, and Sarah Ansari, ‘The Flux of the Matter: Loyalty, Corruption and the Everyday State in the Post-Partition Government Services of India and Pakistan’, Past and Present, 219 (2013), 237–279. Guha, Ramachandra, India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, Oxford: Macmillan, 2007. Guha, Ranajit, ‘Discipline and Mobilize’, in Subaltern Studies VII: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. by Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 69–120. Guha, Ranajit, ‘On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India’, in Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. by Ranajit Guha, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982, pp. 1–8. Guha, Sumit, ‘Civilisations, Markets and Services: Village Servants in India from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Centuries’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 41 (2004), 79–101. Guha, Sumit, ‘The Politics of Identity and Enumeration in India, c.1600–1990’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45 (2003), 148–167. Guha, Sumit, ‘Serving the Barbarian to Preserve the Dharma: The Ideology and Training of a Clerical Elite in Peninsular India, c.1300–1800’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 47 (2010), 497–525. Guha, Sumit, ‘Transitions and Translations: Regional Power and Vernacular Identity in the Dakhan, 1500–1800’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 24.2 (2004), 23–31. Gupta, Akhil, ‘Blurred Boundaries: The Discourse of Corruption, the Culture of Politics, and the Imagined State’, American Ethnologist, 22 (1995), 375–402. Gupta, Akhil, Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Hansen, Thomas Blom, ‘Governance and Myths of the State in Mumbai’, in The Everyday State and Society in Modern India, ed. by Chris J. Fuller and Véronique Bénéï, London: Hurst and Company, 2001, pp. 31–67. Hansen, Thomas Blom, Wages of Violence: Naming and Identity in Postcolonial Bombay, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Hardiman, David, Feeding the Baniya: Peasants and Usurers in Western India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996. Hasan, Mushirul, Legacy of a Divided Nation: India’s Muslims since Independence, Boulder: Westview Press, 1997. Hasan, Zoya, Shyam N. Jha, and Rasheeduddin Khan, eds., The State, Political Processes and Identity: Reflections on Modern India, New Delhi: Sage, 1989. Hazareesingh, Sandip, ‘The Quest for Urban Citizenship: Civic Rights, Public Opinion, and Colonial Resistance in Early Twentieth-Century Bombay’, Modern Asian Studies, 34 (2000), 797–829. Holston, James, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Inden, Ronald, Imagining India, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Irschick, Eugene, Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahman Movement and Tamil Separatism, 1916–1929, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Isaka, Riho, ‘Gujarati Elites and the Construction of a Regional Identity in the Late Nineteenth Century’, in Beyond Representation: Colonial and Postcolonial Constructions of Indian Identity, ed. by Crispin Bates, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 151–176.

190

Bibliography

Israel, Milton, and Narendra K. Wagle, Religion and Society in Maharashtra, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. Jaffrelot, Christophe, India’s Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India, London: Hurst and Company, 2003. Jalal, Ayesha, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. James, Cyril L.R., The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, London: Penguin, 2001 [1938]. Jasper, Daniel, ‘Commemorating the “Golden Age” of Shivaji in Maharashtra, India and the Development of Maharashtrian Public Politics’, Journal of Political and Military Sociology, 31 (2003), 215–230. Jayal, Niraja Gopal, Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Jeffrey, Craig, and Jens Lerche, ‘Dimensions of Dominance: Class and State in Uttar Pradesh’, in The Everyday State and Society in Modern India, ed. by Chris J. Fuller and Véronique Bénéï, London: Hurst and Company, 2001, pp. 91–114. Jones, Justin, Shi’a Islam in Colonial India: Religion, Community and Sectarianism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Jones, Kenneth W., ‘Religious Identity and the Indian Census’, in The Census in British India: New Perspectives, ed. by Norman Gerald Barrier, New Delhi: Manohar, 1981, pp. 73–101. Katzenstein, Mary F., Ethnicity and Equality: The Shiv Sena Party and Preferential Policies in Bombay, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979. Kaur, Raminder, Performative Politics and the Culture of Hinduism: Public Uses of Religion in Western India, London: Anthem, 2005. Kaviraj, Sudipta, ‘On State, Society and Discourse in India’, in Rethinking Third World Politics, ed. by James Manor, London: Longman, 1991, pp. 72–99. Khan, Yasmin, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan, London: Yale University Press, 2007. Khan, Yasmin, ‘Performing Peace: Gandhi’s Assassination as a Critical Moment in the Consolidation of the Nehruvian State’, Modern Asian Studies, 45 (2011), 57–80. Khilnani, Sunil, The Idea of India, London: Penguin, 1999. Kidambi, Prashant, ‘Nationalism and the City in Colonial India: Bombay, c.1890–1940’, Journal of Urban History, 38 (2012), 950–967. King, Robert, Nehru and the Language Politics of India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. Kohli, Atul, Democracy and Discontent: India’s Growing Crisis of Governability, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Kothari, Rajni, ‘The Congress “System” in India’, Asian Survey, 4 (1964), 1161–1173. Krishna, Gopal, ‘The Development of the Indian National Congress as a Mass Organization, 1918–1923’, Journal of Asian Studies, 25 (1966), 413–430. Kumar, Ravinder, Western India in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in the Social History of Maharashtra, London: Routledge and Kenan Paul, 1968. Kymlicka, Will, and Wayne Norman, ‘Return of the Citizen: A Survey of Recent Work on Citizenship Theory’, Ethics, 104.2 (1994), 352–381. Mantena, Rama Sundari, ‘Vernacular Publics and Political Modernity: Language and Progress in Colonial South India’, Modern Asian Studies, 47.5 (2013), 1678–1705. Marshall, Thomas H., Citizenship and Social Class, London: Pluto Press, 1992 [1950]. Masselos, James, Towards Nationalism: Group Affiliations and the Politics of Public Associations in Nineteenth-Century Western India, Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1974.

Bibliography 191 McDonald, Ellen E., ‘The Growth of Regional Consciousness in Maharashtra’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 5 (1968), 223–243. Menon, Ritu, and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998. Menon, Vappala P., Integration of the Indian States, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1997 [1956]. Misra, Bankey B., Government and Bureaucracy in India 1947–1976, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986. Mitchell, Lisa, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India: The Making of a Mother Tongue, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. More, Jean-Baptiste Prashant, Muslim Identity, Print Culture, and the Dravidian Factor in Tamil Nadu, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2004. Naregal, Veena, Language Politics, Elites and the Public Sphere: Western India under Colonialism, London: Anthem, 2002. Newbigin, Eleanor, The Hindu Family and the Emergence of Modern India: Law, Citizenship and Community, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Newbigin, Eleanor, ‘Personal Law and Citizenship in India’s Transition to Independence’, Modern Asian Studies, 45 (2011), 7–32. Oddie, Geoffrey A., ‘Christians in the Census: Tanjore and Trichinopoly Districts, 1871– 1901’, in The Census in British India: New Perspectives, ed. by Norman Gerald Barrier, New Delhi: Manohar, 1981, pp. 119–149. O’Hanlon, Rosalind, Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 [1985]. O’Hanlon, Rosalind, ed., A Comparison between Women and Men: Tarabai Shinde and the Critique of Gender Relations in Colonial India, Madras: Oxford University Press, 1994. O’Hanlon, Rosalind, ‘Cultural Pluralism, Empire and the State in Early Modern South Asia: A Review Essay’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 44 (2007), 363–381. O’Hanlon, Rosalind, ‘The Social Worth of Scribes: Brahmins, Kayasthas and the Social Order in Early Modern India’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 47 (2010), 563–595. Olusoga, David, The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of Empire, London: Head of Zeus, 2014. Omissi, David, Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914–1918, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Omvedt, Gail, Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non-Brahman Movement in Western India, 1873 to 1930, Bombay: Scientific Socialist Education Trust, 1976. Omvedt, Gail, Dalit Visions: Tracts for the Times/8, Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1994. Ong, Aihwa, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Orsini, Francesca, The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Orsini, Francesca, ‘What Did They Mean by “Public”? Language, Literature and the Politics of Nationalism’, Economic and Political Weekly, 34.7 (1999), 409–416. Palshikar, Shreeyash, ‘Breaking Bombay, Making Maharashtra: Media, Identity Politics and State Formation in Modern India’, Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Chicago: University of Chicago, 2007. Pandey, Gyanendra, ‘Can a Muslim be an Indian?’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 41 (1999), 608–629.

192

Bibliography

Pandey, Gyanendra, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Parikh, Sunita, The Politics of Preference: Democratic Institutions and Affirmative Action in the United States and India, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Patterson, Maureen, ‘Changing Patterns of Occupation among Chitpavan Brahmans’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 7 (1970), 375–396. Patterson, Maureen, ‘The Shifting Fortunes of the Chitpavan Brahmins: Focus on 1948’, in City, Countryside and Society in Maharashtra, ed. by Donald W. Attwood, Milton Israel, and Narendra K. Wagle, Toronto: University of Toronto, Centre of South Asian Studies, 1988, pp. 35–58. Peabody, Norbert, ‘Cents, Sense, Census: Human Inventories in Late Precolonial and Early Colonial India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 43 (2001), 819–850. Phadke, Yashawant D., Politics and Language, Bombay: Himalaya Publishing House, 1979. Piliavsky, Anastasia, ‘Introduction’, in Patronage as Politics in South Asia, ed. by Anastasia Piliavsky, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014, pp. 1–35. Pinney, Christopher, ‘Colonial Anthropology in the “Laboratory of Mankind”’, in The Raj: India and the British, 1600–1947, ed. by Christopher A. Bayly, London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 1990, pp. 252–261. Preston, Laurence W., The Devs of Cincvad: A Lineage and the State in Maharashtra, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Ramaswamy, Sumathi, Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India, 1891– 1970, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Rao, Anupama, The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Rao, Nikhil, ‘Community, Urban Citizenship and Housing in Bombay, ca. 1919–1980’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 36.3 (2013), 415–433. Raychaudhuri, Tapan, ‘Indian Nationalism as Animal Politics’, Historical Journal, 22 (1979), 747–763. Robb, Peter, The Government of India and Reform: Policies Towards Politics and the Constitution, 1916–1921, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. Rodrigues, Valerian, ‘Citizenship and the Indian Constitution’, in Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution, ed. by Rajeev Bhargava, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 164–188. Rosenthal, Donald B., The Expansive Elite: District Politics and State Policy-Making in India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Rosenthal, Donald B., ‘From Reformist Princes to “Co-Operative Kings” I: Political Change in Pre-Independence Kolhapur’, Economic and Political Weekly, 8 (1973), 903–910. Roy, Asim, ‘Review: The High Politics of India’s Partition: The Revisionist Perspective’, Modern Asian Studies, 24 (1990), 385–408. Saberwal, Satish, Roots of Crisis: Interpreting Contemporary Indian Society, New Delhi: Sage, 1996. Sarkar, Sumit, ‘Indian Democracy: The Historical Inheritance’, in The Success of India’s Democracy, ed. by Atul Kohli, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 23–46. Sarkar, Sumit, Modern India, 1885–1947, New Delhi: Macmillan, 2002 [1983]. Sarkar, Sumit, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1973.

Bibliography 193 Sarkar, Sumit, Writing Social History, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. Sassen, Saskia, ‘The Participation of States and Citizens in Global Governance’, Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 10 (2003), 5–28. Scott, Joan Wallach, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man, Cambridge, MA: University of Harvard Press, 1996. Sen, Uditi, ‘The Myths Refugees Live By: Memory and History in the Making of Bengali Refugee Identity’, Modern Asian Studies, 48 (2014), 37–76. Shani, Ornit, Communalism, Caste and Hindu Nationalism: The Violence in Gujarat, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Shani, Ornit, ‘Conceptions of Citizenship in India and the “Muslim Question”’, Modern Asian Studies, 44 (2010), 145–173. Sherman, Taylor C., ‘Migration, Citizenship and Belonging in Hyderabad (Deccan), 1946– 1956’, Modern Asian Studies, 45 (2011), 81–107. Sherman, Taylor C., Muslim Belonging in Secular India: Negotiating Citizenship in Postcolonial Hyderabad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Sinha, Mrinalini, Specters of Mother India: The Global Restructuring of an Empire, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Stern, Robert W., ‘Maharashtrian Linguistic Provincialism and Indian Nationalism’, Pacific Affairs, 37 (1964), 37–49. Stern, Robert W., The Process of Opposition in India, London: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Sturman, Rachel, The Government of Social Life in Colonial India: Liberalism, Religious Law, and Women’s Rights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Talbot, Ian, ‘Punjabi Refugees’ Rehabilitation and the Indian State: Discourses, Denials and Dissonances’, Modern Asian Studies, 45 (2011), 109–130. Tan, Tai Yong, and Gyanesh Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia, London: Routledge, 2000. Tejani, Shabnum, Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History, 1890–1950, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Tillin, Louise, Remapping India: New States and Their Political Origins, London: Hurst and Company, 2013. Tomlinson, Tom B. R., The Indian National Congress and the Raj, 1929–1942: The Penultimate Phase, London: Macmillan, 1976. Tucker, Richard, ‘Hindu Traditionalism and Nationalist Ideologies in Nineteenth-Century Maharashtra’, Modern Asian Studies, 10 (1976), 321–348. Wagle, Narendra K., ‘A Dispute between the Pancal Devajna Sonars and the Brahmans of Pune Regarding Social Rank and Ritual Privileges: A Case Study of the British Administration of Jati Laws in Maharashtra, 1822–1825’, in Images of Maharashtra: A Regional Profile of India, ed. by Narendra K. Wagle, London: Curzon Press, 1980, pp. 129–159. Washbrook, David, The Emergence of Provincial Politics: The Madras Presidency 1870– 1920, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 [1976]. Washbrook, David, ‘Towards a History of the Present: Southern Perspectives on the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: India and Pakistan in Transition, ed. by Dipesh Chakrabary, Rochona Majumdar, and Andrew Sartori, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 332–357. Weil, Patrick, How to be French: Nationality in the Making since 1789, trans. by Catherine Porter, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Weiner, Myron, Sons of the Soil: Migration and Ethnic Conflict in India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.

194

Bibliography

Wilkinson, Steven I., Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Wink, André, Land and Sovereignty in India: Agrarian Society and Politics under the Eighteenth-Century Maratha Svarajya, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Zachariah, Benjamin, Nehru, London: Routledge, 2004. Zamindar, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Zook, Darren C., ‘Developing the Rural Citizen: Southern India, 1900–1947’, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 23.1 (2000), 65–86.

Index

Abad, L.R. 100 abhang 26 Aboriginal and Hill Tribes 119, 122, 160 (see also adivasi; Scheduled Tribe) adivasi: agrarian relations and land repossession 97; and education 139, 151–6; as integral part of Maharashtra 98; linguistic affinities of 96, 139, 143, 151–2, 154–60; protection for in Samyukta Maharashtra 65; religious affinities of 142–3, 152–4 (see also Aboriginal and Hill Tribes; Scheduled Tribes) ‘Advanced’ classes 110–13, 120, 125–6 Advisory Committee on Fundamental Rights and Minorities 125 Afagi 26 affirmative action 101, 108–9, 114–18, 124–7, 129–31 (see also bureaucratic reservations; representation) Aga Khan 115 Ahir 117 Ahirani 158–61 Akali Dal 92 Akola Pact 64 Ali, A. 93, 171 Allied Castes 30–3, 122–3, 130 Allied Castes Conference 32 All India Congress Committee 40, 80n55, 93–5, 98–9 All India Hindu Conference 40 (see also Hindu Mahasabha) All India Maratha Educational Conference 111 Ambedkar, B.R.: and alliance with nonBrahmans 21, 42–3, 45–6, 52n84, 73, 172–3; on Dalits as a distinct minority 4, 43–5, 74; on demand for Pakistan 15, 60, 72–5, 78n7, 173; and Gandhi 44–6, 153; on linguistic reorganisation 15, 72–5,

150, 173; and ‘Maharashtrian-ness’ 46; on majority rule 4–5, 15, 31; religious radicalism and conversion 43, 45, 128, 153, 164n59, 174; on separate electorates 44–5, 153; on territorial separation 4, 46, 74–5, 173 Andhra Pradesh 54, 174 animism 152, 154 Aryan 25–6, 28, 41, 43, 149, 151, 159 ati-shudra 41–2, 45–6 (see also Dalit; Depressed Classes; Scheduled Castes; untouchables) Awate, A.S. 100 ‘Backward’ classes 30, 96–7, 106n61, 111, 113–20, 122–7, 161 Backward Classes Commission 124–31 backwardness 85, 96–8, 115, 120–2, 125–30, 133n25, 167; claims to 21, 30–1, 47, 108–9, 117, 121–2, 168; and Nehruvianism 11, 67, 92, 97, 125–6, 129; and ‘uplift’ 139, 153–5 bahujan samaj 5, 21, 25–6, 30–1, 35, 41, 43, 47 Bahujan Samaj Party 174 Bajirao II 25 Balkanisation 15, 100 (see also secessionism; parochialism; provincialism) Bande Mataram 38 Banerjea, S. 9 bania 46, 73, 97, 111 Bariya 127 belonging 1–2, 20, 34, 36, 55, 59–61, 69, 175; exclusive conceptions of 1, 5, 20, 26, 55, 57, 68–9, 77, 95, 98, 103, 131–2, 152, 167, 173; myriad forms 9–10, 56, 61, 65, 98, 132, 174; relationship with democracy 10–11, 13–4, 57, 85, 94

196

Index

Bengal 3–6, 40, 60, 109, 120–1, 168; first partition of 38; second partition of 57, 145; and 1941 Census 62, 138, 142–3, 148, 152–3 bhakti 25, 35 Bharatiya Janata Party 174 Bhil 119, 152, 158 Bhili 139, 143, 154–7, 159–61 (see also Dangi) Bijapur Sultanate 27 Bombay Citizens’ Committee 69–71 Bombay City 11, 29, 32–3, 55, 64, 67, 69–74, 88, 94–5, 121, 170, 173 Bombay Legislative Assembly 109–10, 122, 150, 159, 171 Bombay Legislative Council 23 Bombay Native Education Society 34 Bombay Provincial Congress Committee 11, 72, 88, 93–4, 171 Bombay Provincial Non-Brahman Conference 33 Bora, K.D. 100 Bowman, J.B. 146, 155, 159 boundary demarcation 5–6, 58, 62, 138, 140, 145–6, 151, 159, 161 Brahman: as ‘aliens’ 5, 21, 25–6, 37, 41; alliance with Marathas 14, 37, 43, 46–7, 87–9, 98–9; bastardy and effeminacy 37; cultural hegemony 28, 34–6; electoral antagonisms with Marathas 90, 98–9; elite dominance 14, 25, 28–9, 31–2, 42, 111–13, 117, 133n19, 140–1; as kingmakers 27 (see also high-caste) Buddhism 75–6, 128, 164n59, 174 bureaucracy (see also state) bureaucratic reservations 15, 41, 108–9, 111–12, 115–20, 122–3, 129–30 (see also affirmative action; reservations) business 55, 64, 69–71, 96–7, 170, 174 Cabinet Mission 57, 59, 124 ‘Cambridge School’ 38–9 candidate selection 15, 83–7, 90–1, 93–7, 99–103; and bureaucratic reservations 111–14, 124, 126 caste 1–4, 6–7, 10–14, 20–33, 41–7, 140–1; and bureaucratic reservations 109–11, 113–15, 119–31; and census enumeration 142–5, 152–3; and educational uplift 154–6; and electoral politics 83–6, 93–4, 99–101; harmonious relations 61–3; ‘system’ 37, 41, 67, 140

census 20, 29, 114; classification 140–4, 148, 151–2, 154, 157, 160; data collection 132, 138–9, 143, 151; manipulation of 139, 141–2, 145–8, 152–4, 158–60; postcolonial continuities 138–9, 141–5, 154, 157 (see also enumeration) Census Committee of the Kannada Population at Belgaum 146–7 Central Provinces 6, 38 (see also Madhya Pradesh) Chavke, G.G. 120 Chhapparband 119 Chiplunkar, K. 34 Chiplunkar, V. 34, 36 Chitpavan Brahman 89, 112 Christian 76, 99, 114, 120, 127–8 citizenship 1–2, 42, 66, 141, 171, 175; ethnicised 159; everyday articulations of 108, 130–1; inclusive 147; individual and universal 71, 74; relationship with democracy 10–11, 13, 69, 85, 91; theorising 7–10 civic rights 21, 42–3, 46, 74, 172 Civil Disobedience 87, 89 class 27, 45, 64, 73, 96–7, 114, 125–9, 133n25, 139–40, 143–4, 157 Colebrooke, H. 25 colonial state 12–13, 20, 23, 44, 87, 89–90, 108–9, 111, 114–17, 153, 167 (see also Government of India) commensuration 12–13, 24, 29, 31, 33, 43, 47, 54, 56, 65, 68–9, 74–5, 77, 101–2, 108, 150, 169, 171–2, 175 (see also equalisation; social amelioration) Communal Award 44, 153, 169 communalism 8, 12, 14–15, 39, 55, 65–7, 69, 75–7, 84, 86, 92–5, 99–103, 111, 114, 116, 126, 129, 139–40, 145, 148, 151–4, 156–8, 161, 169, 171–2, 175 community 7, 10, 12–13, 20–1, 108, 138–42, 175; contrasted to individualism 10, 20, 111, 167; politicisation of 12–13, 20–1, 31, 33, 39, 44–5, 48, 83–91, 94, 103, 108, 110, 114–5, 168–9, 171 (see also majoritarianism) Congress High Command 62, 65, 85, 87 Congress system 88 Congress Working Committee 93 constituency 12, 16, 22, 29–31, 45, 47–8, 87, 90, 92, 95–7, 100, 116 Constituent Assembly 7–8, 10, 57–9, 84, 109, 124–7

Index constitution 4, 7–8, 13–14, 57–8, 63–4, 88, 92, 124; constitutional reforms 21, 23, 32–3, 39–41, 44, 84–5, 89, 110, 115; constitutional safeguards 24, 33, 39–40, 44, 56, 63–5, 68–9, 71–2, 74, 77, 86, 115, 120, 125–7, 144, 151–2, 155, 161 (see also Government of India Act, 1919; Government of India Act, 1935; Montagu-Chelmsford Report, 1918) Convention on Linguistic and Cultural Provinces 58 cosmopolitanism 13, 33, 55, 70, 76, 88 ‘creamy layer’ 121, 123, 135n67 Criminal Tribes 111 Daivadnya 117 Dakhani 26 Daldi 119 Dalit 2, 41–3, 111; access to public spaces 21, 42, 46, 74, 172, 174; alliance with non-Brahmans 21–2, 28–31, 37, 41–7, 73, 172, 174; and conversion 128, 153, 174; as minority 13–14, 22, 43–7, 56, 62, 65, 72–5, 78, 114–15, 153, 168–9, 172; and partition 72–5; and Samyukta Maharashtra 61–2, 65, 72–5, 173; as territorially dispersed 4–5, 22, 46, 56, 72–5, 78, 173 Dalit Panthers 174 Dalitsthan 4–5, 75, 173 Dangi 139, 143, 155, 159–61 (see also Bhili) Dangs 6, 143, 145, 151–2, 154–61 Dang Seva Mandal 157 Dantwala, M.L. 70 Das, P. 43 Deccan Riots, 1875 97 Deccan Ryots Association 30 Declaration of the Rights of Man 24 decolonisation (see independence) Defence of India Act, 1915 (see Rowlatt Bills) Delhi Muslim Proposals 40 democracy 22, 24, 29–31, 47–8, 167, 169, 171–3, 175; and bureaucratic reservations 110, 115–16, 129–32; and the census 148–52, 154; and Congress candidate selection 84–8, 90–1, 94–5, 98–9, 101–3; and official language 156; relationship to belonging and citizenship 10–11; and Samyukta Maharashtra 54–9, 63, 65, 67–71, 73–7; theoretical underpinnings of 10–14 (see also

197

commensuration; majoritarianism; non-discrimination) democratic governance 2, 5–6, 12, 33, 54, 58, 63, 72, 77, 84–5, 88, 99, 124, 130, 161 democratisation 10, 14, 16, 20, 23–4, 39, 47–8, 116, 118, 168, 172, 175 (see also devolution; Indianisation; provincial autonomy) demographics 2, 4, 6, 15, 20–2, 29, 31–3, 41, 44–5, 47, 55–6, 61, 73–5, 86, 89–90, 94, 99, 108–9, 115, 119–22, 130, 132, 139, 142–3, 145, 148, 156, 160, 168, 172 (see also number) Deo, S. 58, 62, 64 Depressed Classes 23, 42, 44–5, 111, 114–15, 153 (see also ati-shudra; Dalit; Harijan; Scheduled Castes; untouchables) Depressed Classes and Aboriginal Tribes Committee 111 Depressed Classes Mission 42 Desai, A.M. 159–60 Desai, M. 11, 83, 93, 102, 147, 157–9, 171 desh 3 Deshache Dushman 37 Deshmukh, B.D. 129 Deshmukh, K.T. 64 Deshmukh, P.K. 64 Deshmukh, P.S. 125–6 devolution 3, 22, 37–9, 85, 91, 168 (see also democratisation; dyarchy; Indianisation; provincialisation) Dhangar 30, 99, 101–2, 121–2, 127 Dharala 127 Dhodia 96 Dhubla 96 Divatia, H. 96 Dravidian 4, 25–6, 41, 151, 159 dyarchy 23, 32, 116, 145 (see also democratisation; devolution; provincial autonomy; provincialisation) East Pakistan Renaissance Society 3 education 23, 26, 29–30, 34, 41–2, 63–5, 68, 83, 108, 111–14, 119, 123, 125, 127, 129, 139, 152, 154–57, 160–1, 168, 172 egalitarianism 28, 35, 47, 92, 171 electoral weight 20, 87, 114 enfranchisement 15, 23, 29, 44, 101 (see also universal suffrage) Enthoven, R.E. 27 enumeration 12, 15, 20, 114, 138–46, 154–6, 158–61, 170, 172–3, 175

198

Index

equalisation 12, 23–6, 44, 63, 67, 69, 77, 87, 101–2, 108, 115–16, 128–30, 150–1, 168, 171–2 (see also commensuration) ethnicity 4, 7, 95–6, 140, 144–5, 148–9, 151–2, 159–60 (see also race) federalism 1, 3–5, 21, 40, 55, 58–61, 132, 170, 175 First World War 2, 20, 22, 26, 29, 110 franchise 10, 15, 20–1, 23, 29–30, 32–3, 39, 42, 44, 48, 52n84, 84, 86, 91, 99, 101, 110, 114, 116, 168 Gabit 96, 122–3, 131 (see also Konkani Maratha) Gadgil, D.R. 5, 58–61, 72 Gadgil, N.V. 47 Gaga Bhatta 27 Ganapati utsava 36, 38 Gandhi, I. 11, 70, 84, 88, 173 Gandhi, M.K. 4, 9, 23, 32–3, 46, 62, 68, 89, 113; assassination 66–8, 76, 80n55, 98; and Poona Pact 44–5, 153 gender 24, 28, 37–8, 63 ‘General’ constituency 30, 32–3, 44–5, 47, 92, 116, 153, 169 Gheewala, C.L. 64, 72 Godse, N. 66, 68 Gokhale, K.G. 150 Gokhale, N.K. 99 governmentality (see state) Government of India 22, 33, 116, 118, 120, 124, 126, 129 (see also colonial state) Government of India Act, 1919 3, 9, 23–4, 30, 32, 38–9, 42, 109–10 (see also Montagu-Chelmsford Report) Government of India Act, 1935 3, 24, 33, 40, 44, 87, 109, 118, 168–9 Great War (see First World War) Grierson, G. 159 Gujarat Research Society 96, 159 Gujarati 5, 6, 13, 22, 31, 33–4, 38, 88, 95–6, 99, 118, 120–1, 170, 173, 175; and 1951 Census 139, 143, 145, 151, 154–61; as alien ‘outsiders’ 5, 21, 96–8; business elites 46, 55, 64, 68–74, 96–8, 170 Haitian Revolution 24 Harijan 113, 153 (see also ati-shudra; Dalit; Depressed Classes; Scheduled Castes; untouchables) high-caste 3–4, 24–5, 47, 62–3, 125, 152, 154–6, 160–1, 168 (see also Brahman)

Hindi 34, 51n56, 63, 74, 95, 145 (see also Hindustani) Hindu 24–5, 27–8, 38, 41–3, 45, 148, 174; majority 20, 24, 40, 43–7, 57, 59–60, 62, 68, 73, 75, 85, 102, 114, 116–17, 129, 131–2, 152–6, 166, 168–70, 172–4; and Marathas 36–7, 45–7, 59–60, 169, 172; nationalism 26, 66, 70, 92–3, 100, 106n69, 142, 152–6, 174–5; and reservations 109, 111, 114, 116–17, 125, 127–9, 131–2 Hindu Mahasabha 39–40, 62, 66, 70, 92, 120 (see also All India Hindu Conference) Hindustani 145 (see also Hindi; Urdu) Hiray, B.S. 11, 58–9, 64, 90–1, 99–101, 147 Hodge, J.D.V. 116 homeland 4–5, 13, 20, 38, 68, 103, 150 (see also territory) Huq, F. 3 imperial citizenship 8–9 independence 23, 58, 87, 142, 173; 143–5, 150; changes since colonial period 2, 7–9, 34, 41, 66–7, 126, 154, 161; continuities with colonial period 2, 7–10, 86, 117, 120, 145, 152, 154, 161, 174; visions of 2–5, 10, 39, 54, 57–9, 62, 72, 77, 124, 150 (see also partition; self-determination; swaraj) Independent Labour Party 45–6, 73 Indian Civil Service 13, 24, 110 Indian Merchants’ Chamber 64, 69–71 Indian National Congress 22, 24, 30, 32, 36, 39, 83, 109, 111, 113–15; and Dalit integration 62, 144, 153–4; non-Brahman integration 14, 21, 33, 37, 45–6, 86–91, 98–101, 121, 169; response to Samyukta Maharashtra 15, 33–4, 56, 65–6, 68, 70, 72, 76, 84, 88, 91, 98, 169; as ‘umbrella’ organisation 11, 15, 33–4, 83–5, 88, 92–4, 171–2, 175 (see also candidate selection) Indian Statutory Commission (see Simon Commission) Indianisation 12, 110, 116 (see also democratisation; devolution) Indianness 10, 68 (see also nationalism) Indigeneity 25–6, 85, 96–7, 148, 156 intermediaries 20, 27, 138, 141, 143, 145–6, 148, 158, 161 ‘Intermediate’ classes 109–15, 117–28, 130–1, 170

Index interwar period 13, 22–4, 29, 33, 39, 73, 116, 154; significance of 10, 12, 16, 20–2, 37, 46–7, 85–8, 102, 109–10, 126, 130–1, 139, 168–9, 173–5 Jain 30, 99 Jambhekar, B. 34 Jana Sangh 66, 92, 100 jati 3, 35, 125, 128, 140 (see also caste; varna) Javalkar, D.S. 43, 90 Jedhe, K. 89, 98–100, 102 Jinnah, M.A. 3–4, 22, 40, 55, 60–1, 74, 78, 168 Jones, W. 25 Julaha 128 jus sanguinus 7 jus soli 7 JVP Committee 54, 58, 71 Kadadi, N.B. 146, 150, 170–2 Kalelkar, K. 127–8 Kanarese (see Kannada) Kannada 6, 31, 33, 38, 40, 71, 88, 99, 118–19, 121, 142, 146–51, 158, 168, 170, 173, 175 Karkhanis, R.K. 100 Karnataka 33, 40, 88, 111, 142, 150, 168 Katkari 96 Kayastha Prabhu 111 Kelkar, D.V. 71 Khandeshi 158–60 Kher, B.G. 11, 15, 113, 122, 143–5, 157–8, 171 Khoja 70 King Bali 25 Koli 30, 42, 96 Konkani Maratha 122–3 (see also Gabit) Konkani Maratha Sangh 122–3 Koshti 99 Kothadiya, W.H. 99 Kripalani, J.B. 93 Kshatriya 25–30, 33, 37, 43, 47, 80n55, 172 kshetra 25 Kulkarni, D.M. 151 Kunbi 2, 6, 27–30, 32–3, 37, 62 Kurubar (see Dhangar) Kurubar Wool Industry Development Cooperative Association 121 Lahore Resolution 3, 57, 141, 170 landlord 30, 32, 46, 73, 97

199

language 10, 37, 54, 58–9, 63; diversity 1, 34, 55, 63, 74, 77; linguistic community 6–7, 14, 34–5, 47, 55, 59–60, 72, 88, 98, 138–9, 144–5, 151–2, 157, 159–60; uniformity 6, 34–5, 47, 55, 57, 59–61, 77, 96, 98, 146, 151–2, 155–60, 161 Latthe, A.B. 30 liberal elite 11 liberalism 7, 10, 12–13, 22–5, 44–5, 48, 108, 112, 115, 141, 148, 152, 168 Lingayat 6, 30, 99, 109, 111 Linguistic Provinces Commission 54, 61, 68, 71, 147–8 Linguistic Provinces Committee (see JVP Committee) linguistic reorganisation 2, 5–6, 11, 14–16, 22, 46–7, 54–5, 58–9, 61–3, 65, 67–9, 71–2, 75–8, 84, 86, 91, 95, 98, 100, 103, 118, 124, 138–9, 142–3, 145, 148, 152, 154, 159–61, 167, 169–71, 175 (see also provincial reorganisation) Lord Chelmsford 23, 29, 38 Lord Curzon 38 L’Ouverture, Toussaint 24 Madhya Pradesh 64, 76 Mahamandal, V. 159 Mahar 41–2, 44, 62, 164n59 Maharaja of Kolhapur (see Shahu II) Maharashtra Chamber of Commerce 71 Maharashtra dharma 35–6 Maharashtra Ekikaran Samiti 145 Maharashtra Provincial Congress Committee 11, 33, 46, 88, 90–1, 94, 99, 103, 106n61, 147, 169, 174 Mahar Seva Sangh 44 majoritarianism 3, 5, 12–13, 21, 31, 33, 41, 45–7, 56, 63, 66, 69, 71, 74, 76–7, 84–5, 88, 90–1, 94–5, 98, 101–3, 110, 116, 124, 129–32, 150–2, 156, 159–60, 167, 169–70, 172–5 Mali 25, 30, 99 Mandal Commission 129 Mang 41 Maratha 59, 167, 169; 96 ‘pure’ families 28; and ‘Allied Castes’ 6, 28, 29–33, 169, 172; and Brahmans 37, 65, 88–91, 169; and Dalits 21, 28, 42–6, 153, 172–3; diverse meanings 2, 26–29, 144, 149; as majority 5, 13, 22, 47, 86, 91, 98–103, 110–11, 121–4, 173, 175; as martial race 37, 113, 169; polity 1,

200

Index

25, 27–8, 35–7, 59–60, 112, 149; and Samyukta Maharashtra 13, 56, 74, 172 Maratha League 30, 100 Marathi 1, 5, 47, 56, 60–2, 73, 77, 98, 103, 132, 172, 175; language 34–7, 41, 54–5, 62–3, 146–9, 155–60; manus 26, 29, 37, 47, 98 marathmola 28, 47 Marathwada 6, 76 martial race 37, 169 Marwari 46, 71 Mashruwala, K. 125 Memon 70 memorials (see petitions) merchant 21, 30, 32, 64, 69–71, 97–8, 157 (see also bania; Marwari; moneylender) merit 109, 112, 130 Miana 119 migration 8, 26–7, 75, 78, 95, 97, 118, 148, 170, 173–4 minority 4, 15, 20–2, 40, 44–6, 54–6, 62–5, 68–70, 72–7, 84–6, 93–4, 101, 109, 114–17, 119–20, 124–5, 142, 150–2, 168–73, 175; rights 3, 8, 84, 95, 97, 118, 130, 142, 148, 175; safeguards 8, 68–9 (see also Ambedkar; commensuration; Dalit; Muslim; nondiscrimination; rights) Minority Pact 73, 75–7 modernisation 11, 13, 34, 92, 140, 143, 154, 167, 171 moneylender 97 (see also bania; Marwari; merchant) Montagu-Chelmsford Report, 1918 23, 30, 87 (see also Government of India Act, 1919) Montagu, E. 22–3, 29, 38 Mookerjee, S.M. 66 mother tongue 34, 54–5, 57, 68, 77, 139, 143, 145–8, 150–2, 154–5, 157–61, 170 (see also vernacular) Mukherji, U.N. 152 Munshi, K.M. 90, 113, 125–6, 170 Muslim: and census enumeration 145, 148, 152–3, 156; and community representation 168, 171; dynasties of the Deccan 26–7, 112; as ‘invaders’; as intruders and invaders 21, 26, 36, 60; as minority 8, 10, 13, 20–1, 24, 44, 62, 68, 75, 78, 93–4, 102, 109, 114–17, 119–20, 127–8, 168–70; questionable loyalties 2–3, 6, 169–70; as regional majority 3–5, 14, 22, 31, 40, 57, 68, 73–4, 78,

109, 118, 120, 124, 168–9 (see also commensuration; community; minority; non-discrimination; separatism; Pakistan; partition) Muslim League 3, 22, 39–40, 57, 59–62, 73–4, 78, 100, 119, 124, 132, 145 Nagpur Pact 65, 76 Naoroji, D. 9 nationalism 2–4, 6–11, 20–6, 34–7, 39–40, 44–6, 54–7, 59–62, 64–75, 77–8, 84, 87–94, 96, 99, 101, 113, 115, 117, 124–5, 127, 140, 142–5, 147, 149–50, 152–3, 157, 167, 169, 173–5 Nationalist Congress Party 129 nativism 149, 174 (see also sons-of-the-soil) Nehru, J. 11–12, 14–15, 55–6, 66–8, 71, 76–7, 83–6, 88, 92–4, 96, 98–100, 102–3, 169–71, 175 Nehru, M. 39 Nehru Report 39–40, 168 Nehruvianism 11–12, 15, 44, 55–6, 66–9, 71, 77, 83–6, 88, 92–4, 96, 98–100, 102–3, 109, 144, 169, 171–3 neo-liberalism 9 Nibandhmala 34 Nijalingappa, S. non-Brahman; as bahujan samaj 5, 21, 26, 41, 47, 114, 174; and Brahmans 5, 14, 25, 36–7, 47, 169; and bureaucratic reservations 120–3; and Dalits 14, 21–2, 41–7, 73–5, 172–4; and integration into Congress 33, 86–91, 98–9; and Marathas 27–32, 37, 100–3, 110–11, 122–3, 131; and Muslims 170; as original inhabitants 25–6, 173; and Samyukta Maharashtra 22, 62 (see also Allied Castes; Dhangar; Kunbi; Marathas) Non-Brahman League 89 Non-Brahman Party 21, 32, 45, 89–90 Non-Cooperation Movement 32, 89 non-discrimination 11–14, 54–6, 65, 67–70, 74, 77, 84, 88, 95, 102, 171–2, 175 number 4, 12, 14–16, 20–2, 29–33, 46, 76–7, 93–4, 114–15, 119, 123, 152–6, 160–1, 168, 174; territorialisation of 4, 15, 31, 38–40, 55, 60, 62, 72–5, 78, 168, 173 (see also demographics) Orientalist 25, 140, 167 Other Backward Class 101, 109, 111, 119, 124–9, 131, 135n67, 144, 174

Index Pakistan 2, 8, 60, 66, 72, 92, 100, 118; demand for 1, 56, 169–70, 175; and number 4–5, 14–15, 40, 47, 60, 65, 73–4, 124, 145, 149; as one manifestation of variety of demands for freedom 3–5, 14–16, 46–7, 55–7, 59, 65, 72–5, 78, 124, 131–2, 142, 167–8; repercussions of 68, 124–5 (see also partition) pandit 27 Pant, G.B. 10, 169 Paper Traders Association 70 Parashurama 27 parochialism 13, 93, 147, 171 (see also provincialism; regionalism) Parsi 70, 99, 111 partition 4, 38, 57; impact of provincialisation on 3, 39; implications of 8, 14, 54, 65–8, 70, 73, 86, 92, 100, 103, 117, 124–5 170; ‘long’ 2, 170; similarities with linguistic reorganisation 5–6, 16, 54, 62, 67, 75, 86, 138, 148, 170, 173; widened perspective 1, 3–5, 16, 142 (see also Pakistan) Patel, D. 89–91 Patel, V. 66, 169 Patil, M.T. 100 Patil, S.K. 11, 94 patronage 39, 85–6, 91, 141 pavada 26 Pawar, S. 129 peasant 27, 29–30, 32, 45, 73, 90, 97–8, 100, 102, 128 Peasants and Workers Party 98, 100, 102 Peshwa 25, 35, 37, 112, 133n19 petitions 9, 15, 32, 80n55, 85, 94, 97–8, 103, 113–14, 117, 120–4, 130, 140, 142, 146, 157–8, 161, 171–2 (see also memorials) Phule, J.G. 14, 21, 25–8, 30–1, 35, 41, 43, 47, 172–4 Poona Pact 44–7, 153 Poona Sarvajanik Sabha 35–6 Poona School 36, 68 postcolonial transition 1, 4, 7, 10, 15, 46, 61, 75, 78, 84, 173, 175 Prasad, R. 169 primordialism 1, 11, 13, 55, 67–8, 83, 92, 140, 144, 171 princely states 4, 6, 26, 28, 38, 66, 95, 149, 156–7, 165n76 property 23, 29, 42, 169

201

proportional representation 40, 109, 168 provincialism 66, 100 (see also parochialism; regionalism) provincial autonomy 1–5, 9–10, 16, 39, 55, 57, 59, 72, 78, 124, 145, 175 (see also devolution; dyarchy) provincial reorganisation 9, 12, 34, 37–40, 58, 66, 96, 147, 154, 157, 160–1, 172 (see also linguistic reorganisation) provincialisation 9, 38–40, 47, 109, 118, 130, 170, 175 (see also democratisation; devolution; dyarchy) Public Services Commission 113 Punjab 3, 60, 120, 141, 168; and 1941 census 5, 14, 138; partition of 4, 40, 57, 62, 100, 142, 145; reservation policy 109, 121 Puranas 28 race 24, 35, 37, 43, 59, 63, 90, 138–40, 149, 152, 169 (see also ethnicity) Radcliffe, C. 145 Rajagopalachari, C. 4 Rajasthani 160 Rajput 26–8 Rajwade, V.K. 35–6 Ramaswami Naicker, E.V. 4 Ram, K. 174 Ramdas 35–6 Ranade, M.G. 35–6, 62 Rashtriya Janata Dal 174 refugee rehabilitation 2, 6, 8, 66, 118, 170–1 region 3, 21, 24, 59–62, 108, 120–1, 132, 144, 160–1, 169 regionalism 1–2, 4, 10, 14, 16, 34–8, 46–7, 98, 132, 142–3, 145, 167, 174–5 (see also parochialism; provincialism) religion 2–6, 10–12, 20–1, 25–6, 28, 35, 37, 43–5, 55, 57, 59, 61–2, 76, 92, 108, 114, 116, 118–21, 125–6, 128, 131, 138, 140–5, 149–50, 152–4, 160, 167–8, 171–3 representation (see affirmative action; bureaucratic reservations; proportional representation; reservations) representations (see petitions) reservations 14–15, 29–33, 40–1, 44, 47, 108–12, 114–16, 120–32, 173–4 (see also affirmative action; bureaucratic reservations; proportional representation) reserved seats 21, 30–3, 40, 44–6, 85, 93, 122–3, 168–9, 171, 175

202

Index

rights 1, 8–9, 42, 45, 47, 54–6, 64, 74, 92, 125, 131, 175; colonial genealogy 24, 115; communal and group-based 3, 8, 14, 24, 54, 59, 63, 68, 76, 78, 86, 95, 97, 114, 116–18, 120–1, 124, 130, 142–3, 148–52, 155, 160–1, 172; individual 10, 12, 20, 22–3, 48, 54, 63, 67–8, 70, 74, 76–7, 84, 87–8, 92, 101–2, 115, 148, 168 (see also civic rights) Rowlatt Bills 23 Roy, B.P. 148 Roy, S.N. 120 Sali 99 Samajwadi Party 174 Samyukta Maharashtra 1–2, 10–11, 54, 58, 61, 71–2, 77–8, 169; demand for 14, 41, 47–8; as homeland 13, 69, 167; links to majoritarianism 16, 31, 55, 69, 76, 172–3; synergies with Pakistan 5, 14–15, 55–7, 61, 77–8, 132, 175; as threat to minorities 1–2, 15, 56, 63–8, 72, 170–2 Samyukta Maharashtra Parishad 54, 58, 61–5 Samyukta Maharashtra Samiti 54 Santal 152 Sapru, T.B. 39 Sarabji, C. 9 satyagraha 23, 42–3, 93 Satyashodhak Samaj 26, 29, 31, 34, 41 Scheduled Castes 45, 75, 92, 111, 113–17, 124–9, 139, 144, 151 (see also atishudra; Dalit; Harijan; Depressed Classes; untouchables) Scheduled Castes Federation 65, 92 Scheduled Tribes 92, 111, 115, 117, 125–7, 129, 139, 144, 151 (see also Aboriginal and Hill Tribes; adivasi; tribe) secessionism 55, 60, 100 (see also Balkanisation) Second World War 21, 113, 118, 170 secularism 10, 55–7, 67–70, 77, 84–7, 91–5, 97, 99, 101, 105n41, 125, 144, 148, 153–4, 171, 175; pseudo- 106n69, 175 Seddon, C.N. 30 Sedgwick, L.J. 152, 154, 158 Seed Traders’ Association 71 self-determination 24, 44, 58 (see also independence; swaraj) separate electorate 8, 10, 21–2, 24, 30, 40–1, 44–6, 85, 93, 116, 119, 135n61, 153–4, 168–9, 171–2 separatism 3–4, 9, 12, 29, 40, 43–7, 55–7, 59–61, 64–6, 70, 74–8, 86, 89, 91, 100, 102–3, 124, 130, 147, 154, 168, 171, 173

Shahu II 28–30, 41 Shamsuddin, A.K. 3 shetji 46 Shimpi 30, 99 Shinde, V.R. 41–2 Shivaji Bhosale 25, 27–8, 35–7, 90, 122, 173 Shivaji jayanti 36–7 Shiv Sena 173–4 Shroff, K.J. 96–8 Shudra 21, 27, 30, 33, 41–6, 49n25 (see also non-Brahman) Sikh 2, 92, 100, 114 Simon Commission 39 Sind 31, 33, 40, 95, 109, 118–21, 168, 170–1 Sirdar, M.S. 146, 150, 170–2 Sitaramayya, P. 58 social amelioration 125 (see also commensuration; equalisation) Socialist Party 92, 97, 159 society 8, 10–12, 20, 44, 48, 66, 86–7, 99, 108–10, 131, 138–42, 144–5, 161, 167–8; Aryan and pre-Aryan 25, 41; Brahmans as spokesmen of indigenous 112–3; caste and 21, 61–2, 125, 128–9; regeneration 11, 37, 154 soldiers 22, 26, 122 Sonar 99, 117 sons-of-the-soil 26, 96–7, 173 (see also nativism) Southborough Committee 31, 42–3 state 15–16, 48, 54, 86, 108, 139, 143–4; accountability 13–14, 38; corruption and nepotism 13–14, 110, 171–2; ‘everyday’ 11–13, 56, 108, 139–43, 145–7, 152, 158–61, 169, 171–2, 175; legitimacy 2, 66–7, 91, 114; ‘mythic’ and ‘sublime’ 13–14, 32, 147, 161, 171–2; partiality and impartiality 8, 10–12, 20, 24, 55, 69, 71–2, 77, 93, 108, 112–13, 115–16, 119, 125, 129–30, 139–40, 143–7, 150–2, 158–61, 173–5; resources 2, 9, 12, 47, 57, 64, 85 117, 123–4, 146; spatial complexities 13–14, 55–6, 59, 69, 71–2, 74–5, 108, 116–8, 173–4 States Reorganisation Commission 54, 56, 61, 63, 65, 68–9, 71, 74, 76, 144 Surve, A.N. 32 Swadeshi 38 swaraj 2, 54, 58, 87, 118, 142 (see also independence; self-determination) Swaraj Party 87 Symington, D.C. 97

Index Tadvi Bhil 119 Tahilramani, P.V. 170–1 Tandel, D.P. 95–8, 103, 106n61 Tandon, P.D. 93, 105n41 Teli 128 Telugu 34, 51n53, 145, 150 temple entry (see civic rights) territory 14–16, 20, 31, 38, 40, 44, 55, 58, 62–3, 94, 132, 142, 144, 149, 155, 174; territorial contiguity 57–8; territorial separation 3, 22, 46, 55–6, 59–61, 72–5, 77–8, 170, 173; territorialisation 2, 4, 21–2, 40, 55–7, 60–2, 72–5, 78, 139, 142, 168, 173 (see also homeland) Thakurdas, P. 64 Thube, V.L. 110–11 Tilak, B.G. 36–8, 89 tribe 126, 138, 152, 155, 157–8 (see also Aboriginal and Hill Tribes; adivasi; Scheduled Tribes) United Provinces 116, 120 (see also Uttar Pradesh) universalism: in relation to citizenship rights 7–10, 45, 47, 67, 71, 77, 102, 115–16; in relation to territory 59

203

‘universal backwardness’ 109, 129–30, 174 universal suffrage 12, 83, 101 (see also enfranchisement; universalism) untouchables 30, 41–5, 62, 111, 113, 150, 153, 172 (see also ati-shudra; Dalit; Harijan; Depressed Classes; Scheduled Castes) untouchability 41–2, 44, 153 uplift 96, 109, 111, 139–40, 151–6, 160–1 Urdu 145, 147, 149–50, 155, 171 (see also Hindustani) Uttar Pradesh 174 (see also United Provinces) varna 27 (see also caste; jati) Vedas 25, 28, 43 vernacular 33–5, 88, 121, 139, 143, 152, 154–5, 157–61 (see also language; mother tongue) Vidarbha 6, 64–5, 76–7, 80n44, 125 Vivekananda, S. 62 Warli 96 Wayase, D.R. 100–1 Yeatts, M.W.M. 148