Author Manoj Mitta spoke to The Wire’s Sravasti Dasgupta about his latest book Caste Pride: Battles for Equality in Hindu India, which explores the struggle for legal reforms aimed at eradicating caste-based injustice, shedding light on groundbreaking reforms and the societal dynamics that necessitated their implementation.

In the conversation, they unpack these legal battles to provide a wider lens to understand the persistent endurance of caste-based inequality and why caste-based violence continues with impunity, despite the constitutional guarantee of equality.

The following is a transcript of a video interview that was published by The Wire on August 27, 2023. It has been edited lightly for style, syntax and clarity.

§

Last week, India celebrated 76 years of independence, but many in our country are still looking for independence from caste prejudice and discrimination. Today at The Wire, we are being joined by Manoj Mitta. He is a former journalist and now a writer. He has written two books, and he comes to us with his third book, which is called Caste Pride: Battles for Equality in Hindu India.

I would say that this is essential reading for anybody who wishes to understand India's trajectory with caste, and how the battle for legal equality has played out from colonial times till now. This book is vast. It's extensive, but I would urge our readers to read it, because it is essential to our understanding of the legal history along with the political history of where India is today in terms of caste.

Thank you so much, Manoj, for joining us at The Wire.

Thanks, Sravasti, for your generous introduction.

So, my first question to you, as the book suggests, is on the battles for equality in Hindu India, and it kind of traverses India's legal and political history for over 200 years.

Now, you have written two books in the past: one was on the Sikh riots, one was on the Gujarat riots in 2002. What made you choose caste as the topic of your third book?

As you said, I dealt with two egregious instances of mass violence, and what I was originally planning to do was complete a trilogy on mass violence.

This time, I wanted to focus on mass violence targeting Dalits, and I wanted to explore this question: Why is there so much impunity for such instances of mass violence despite a special law, you know, unlike in the case of communal violence where there is no special enactment, in the case of violence or atrocities committed against Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, there is a law, and a law that is supposed to be rather stringent – and in the eyes of some, even draconian – and so my question was why is there so much impunity for it?

And when I looked at some of those instances, you know, examined the judgments, looked at the prosecution documents and so on and so forth, I was struck by the fact that again and again I'm coming up with, I mean… I'm confronted by this pattern of some arm or the other of the Indian state betraying caste prejudice.

There was no other way of interpreting it, given the kind of specious grounds on which instances of such magnitude, you know, crimes of such magnitude resulted in acquittals.

So … it could be the police that did the cause of justice in, or it could be the prosecution, or in some instances, the trial court, or it could even be the appellate court.

So, I was trying to understand where was this kind of institutional bias or structural bias coming from, and that made me go into earlier debates, beginning with, say, the debate in the constituent assembly over the abolition of untouchability. And then there were references to what happened during the colonial period, because after all what was happening in the constituent assembly was a legacy of those unfinished battles.

So, one thing led to another and I found myself unearthing a whole lot of hitherto unseen material from legislatures and courts, going all the way back to [the] early 19th century. So, it's over 200 years and different aspects of caste reforms, and they were most revealing … not just about the situation in India at that time of the colonial rule, but also it helps you understand many of today's fault lines.

So that was the spirit in which I expanded the ambit of my book from merely focusing on violence to, you know, where this prejudice was coming from.

Right, so you spoke about how… in the book, you talk about how caste has informed legal punishments and legal reforms throughout colonial history until now.

So in the book, you talk about how the British, in their bid to win over the upper caste – who were essentially the men in power – gave penal provisions an Indian twist. Now, two things stood out to me in this regard: one was the punishment of confinement to the stocks and the other was the exemption of the Banaras Brahmins from the death penalty.

Could you talk to us a little bit about these penalties and how the British gave it an Indian twist, as you call it?

Yeah, so before I go into the details of that, one needs to put that in context. We are now talking about that early phase of colonial rule, after all … colonial rule is said to have begun after the Battle of Plassey in 1757.

So we are talking about the early decades, and this was a time when they were trying to understand our society, our culture, our religion, and they began to do these translations and so on.

So, it was then their understanding that given the fact that they were in one huge country and they were so few in number, one way they thought they could run the country – control these masses – was through the elite, by co-opting the elite.

So, the first thing they did was that in 1795, they came up with this, I mean, among other measures, it took the form of this enactment, this law…

In a departure from their above principle of equality, they exempt Brahmins, and among Brahmins particularly Banaras Brahmins, because they were considered the most sacrosanct, Banaras being the holiest of holy cities. So they exempt Banaras Brahmins from the death penalty irrespective of what crime they were found to have committed.

This is in keeping with this notion, this traditional notion, that Brahmins cannot be killed for any reason whatsoever because that would amount to brahmahatya, for which there is no remedy.

So even somebody like Lord Ram was not exempted, when he killed Ravan – Ravan was supposed to be a Brahmin, while Ram was merely a Kshatriya, which is a rung lower than Brahmins.

So they very wilfully, very astutely, they decide to – or “astutely” in quotes – incorporate that in their system of law and administration.

But thankfully it didn't take long: about two decades later or so, they realised their folly and [did] away with it, they repealed that law.

Shortly after this, or around the time this enactment relating to you know exempting Brahmins from the death penalty is repealed, and somebody in… this happens in Calcutta, Bengal Presidency, the law relating to Brahmins.

Now in the Madras Presidency, somebody who went on to become Governor of Madras, Thomas Munro, when he was in charge of drafting laws for that presidency, came up with this idea of co-opting something from the Western tradition, which is this very corporal, very barbaric form of punishment, called confinement in stocks.

There are references to it in the Bible, in Shakespeare's literature, and in fact, that is the origin of that famous term ‘laughing stock’, you know, so this is about a convicted person being subjected to ridicule, he is put in a public place and his feet would be clamped to a wooden frame with holes, and he would be flung with all sorts of things, spat upon and stuff like that.

So it's a very dehumanising punishment and that was typically reserved for the underclass in the West, you know, the labour that was errant and had to be punished, so this was how they dealt with it. And Munro, very perversely, thought, ‘Okay, why don't I bring that here into the Indian milieu and use it against the lower caste?’

This is the first instance indeed [when] this expression ‘lower caste’ was actually put into law.

Right. So the book also provides a very interesting insight into the intersectionality of caste and patriarchy. In various ways, we see not only women from the lower caste… they are obviously worse off because of their caste, but they get the absolute end of the stick because they are also women.

An example of this, which is very interesting, was about the women in Travancore who were not allowed to cover their breasts in public. So, could you tell us about this incident and how this came about?

Yeah, this was actually a bizarre fallout of Queen Victoria's Proclamation of 1858. This was in turn a sequel to the Great Revolt of 1857, and as you know, it also marked the transition from East India Company [rule] to India being directly ruled by the British Crown.

So, at that time during that period of transition, she made this proclamation and reaffirmed the British commitment to, you know, being very mindful of people's religious feelings, and she undertakes that there would be no attempt to interfere with them, because after all, if you recall, the 1857 revolt was triggered by this perception that, you know, there was some fat made…

… Cartridge, which offended the Hindus and the Muslims for different reasons.

There was this perception that it was either from pigs or from cows. So, mindful as they were of that backdrop, they made that reaffirmation again, and that … when it was translated into Malayalam in Travancore, which was a princely state, they interpreted that to mean that, ‘Okay, since they are not going to interfere with our customs’ … they took it as a license to bring back certain practices which were already repealed due to efforts made by some reformers and because of intervention by the British administration, you know.

So we had this very curious and instructive situation where the dominant caste, the Nairs, in collusion with the diwan, Madhav Rao, who was a Marathi-speaking Brahmin from Tanjore in Madras Presidency, and the king of Travancore, they all came together and decided, ‘Okay, since there is such a demand being made by the dominant caste, we will not let women of lower caste’ … namely Nadar, who were showing signs of, you know, some equality, assertions of equality, because they had been exposed to education, there was also an influence of Christian missionaries, many of them had converted, and they had taken to entrepreneurship.

But because of the stigma of their caste being associated, traditionally, with toddy tapping, they were looked down upon. And one must also bear in mind that in the South, including Travancore, it was not just untouchability – what was practiced there was also ‘unapproachability’.

So they came up with this diabolical device, a proclamation, drawing inspiration from, very erroneously of course, from Victoria’s proclamation, saying that women of the Nadar community will not be allowed to cover their breasts.

Why? Because if they were if they were allowed to do so, then they would be indistinguishable from women from upper castes, and for them it was important to know, from a distance, you need to know whether those people were from this caste or that caste, because there were very strict rules about how much distance each caste had to maintain from the caste that was above it.

It was all very instructive to see how caste was such a non-negotiable, such an overriding concern for us. I mean this is irrespective of the colonial rule; and if anything, colonial rule was not the villain of the piece here, it was our own, you know, obscurantist notions that we were carrying forward.

And these are not things that the British were introducing in our heads, it's something that we had and we were negotiating. Those of us who were in those dominant positions were negotiating with the British in order to perpetuate them.

But then, beyond a point, they could not tolerate that, because there was a pushback from lower castes, from the affected castes, and they tried to be fair and they intervened in a manner that alleviated the situation to an extent.

Yeah. So you have been mentioning this, and as we are still on the topic of intersectionality of caste and patriarchy, another case in point that illustrates this further, as you were mentioning earlier, was the fight to abolish sati.

So, here we find, as you were saying, an unlikely villain… in the book, we find out that the unlikely villain is Motilal Nehru, who was found to be defending sati in the interests of the upper castes. If you could tell us a little bit about this?

But what was his backstory? What did he do when he was not yet such a big leader, when he was a prominent member of the Bar in the Allahabad high court?

He takes up a case in which some four or five persons were already convicted in a case of sati, [having had their plea rejected] that they were not to blame because the pyre lit on its own – a spontaneous combustion took place – because of the sheer piety of the woman who was committing sati.

This was the plea they took in their defence, and that was rejected outright by the trial court. Now, Motilal Nehru takes up this case at the appeal stage and reiterates that line of argument, that line of defence.

The fightback from Indians, Indian politicians, against caste, only happened when some sort of political representation happened for Indians, and they started finding themselves in legislatures following the reforms that took place around that time.

How did this change happen, and how did Indians finally start bringing bills to change the caste hierarchy and the system of discrimination through legal reforms?

See, Indian representation began, you know, way back in 1861 – this was, after all, the change that took place post the revolt and post the entry of the Crown (the Crown was directly ruling us, right).

But then in those early decades, the few Indians who were there in those legislatures were essentially big landlords, zamindars and big rulers themselves, so they were not likely to have any truck with issues concerning social reform or anything of that sort. They were very deeply orthodox in their approach.

But things got better as [more and more constitutional reforms were made] and by the turn of the century, you had people like, say… somebody who was considered Gandhi’s and Jinnah’s mentor, that is Gokhale, entering, people who had their background in Congress discussions and meetings. So, they were members of this, and that did increase the quality of discussions and interventions.

Yet, you know, not until 1916 was the issue of something as egregious as untouchability [taken up] in that House, and when it was, when the silence on untouchability was finally broken, it was not because of any of the prominent leaders with Congress background — it was somebody who was very little known and who was not even a Hindu. His name was Maneckji Dadabhoy, not to be mistaken with Dadabhai Naoroji.

In the 1920s, at a time when, because of the non-cooperation call made by Gandhi in 1920, Congress had actually boycotted these legislative bodies.

And in subsequent years, a breakaway group of the Congress in the form of the Swaraj Party did participate, and it was in order to fill that void that, you know, Justice Party came in in a big way, and they came into power in Madras and they initiated certain reforms. They were the ones who came up with this measure of affirmative action for the first time in British India in the 20s.

So this is how things unfolded.

Yeah. So, you were mentioning earlier about how the Congress did not really… it was a big tent, the Congress was a big tent, as you mentioned and there were all kinds of leaders. So we had a Madan Mohan Malaviya, we also had a Vithalbhai Patel, so we had various kinds of leaders from the Congress and you have written about, and also you mentioned earlier, about how political reforms found precedence over social reforms for the Congress.

So, this is very interesting, if you could tell us a little bit about how the role of the Congress evolved from the ‘20s onwards, where earlier, as you mentioned, that Dadabhai Naoroji had said very clearly in the 1800s that the Congress will not be talking about social reforms at this point and ‘let's just focus on the political agenda’.

But later, in the ‘20s onwards, things started to change within the Congress itself and the fight started focusing on that as well, so if you could tell us about the evolving role of the Congress from the ‘20s onwards?

So, this was a struggle that preceded colonial rule and also survived the end of the colonial rule, the decolonisation of India. And it is still there with us.

Whereas colonial rule ended, as you said at the beginning, in 1947 – we celebrated the 76th anniversary of that, right? Whereas, there is no such anniversary of the end of these social struggles, because those struggles never ended, and Congress took a long while to realise that.

There was a lot of tussle going on in the Congress. There were these battles that were being fought in the Congress and outside, in the larger Indian society during the colonial rule, on this issue of caste, and they were not necessarily between upper castes and lower castes. They were between two sets of Hindus: the progressive, liberal Hindus on one side, and these orthodox, obscurantist Hindus on the other side, who would not hesitate to cite all sorts of reasons relating to custom or even religion, they would quote scriptures to defend the most untenable practices that were in force.

I mean for the kind of arguments, say, somebody like Malaviya gave for opposing the inter-caste marriage Bill initiated by Vithalbhai Patel. So, likewise, you would see somebody like Gandhi also taking very long to understand… for his own understanding to evolve.

Throughout the 1920s, you know, by 1920, he had in a sense captured the Congress party, he became the unchallenged leader of that party, right? So through those ’20s, he was also a votary of the varna system, although formally he had right in the 1920 Nagpur Congress resolutions… [he] was instrumental in making a resolution against untouchability.

But then it [did] not translate into anything radical like, ‘Okay, we will now throw open all these public amenities to Dalits, we will now throw open temples’ – you know, that [temples] were considered an even more challenging, even more sensitive issue.

So, it was not until, say, 1932, the Poona Pact, in which depressed classes, most importantly somebody like Ambedkar, [were] forced to give up their hard-fought right to a separate electorate.

So, when as a result of that Poona Pact, when Gandhi felt the need to make a reciprocal gesture, so there were certain resolutions that were passed by his followers in Bombay, just a day after the Poona Pact, and one of them related to temple entry, and bit by bit as his own understanding got better, he opens up to the idea of Dalits, who were then called depressed classes, he began (around that time) referring to them as Harijans.

So he opened up to that, but even then it was in a very incremental manner. It was not in the sense in which Ambedkar… in 1929, Ambedkar had drafted a Bill which adopted a rights-based approach, which meant that across the board in all temples, all Hindus irrespective of caste, and certainly including avarnas (untouchables), they would be given access to temples.

In 1929, Ambedkar took that position, and in 1933, when Gandhi's eyes opened to the need to deal with the temple entry issue, he does not adopt Ambedkar’s rights-based approach. What he adopts is what he called the ‘local option’ approach, which is that you go and conduct a referendum in a given temple … you take it up on a case-by-case basis, so there's no question of [all temples being opened up overnight], most certainly not those ones which have a long history, you know, which are considered very sacrosanct.

So he said ‘if there is some temple somewhere which wants to open up, you conduct a referendum among the local devotees, and if they are in favour of it, that temple – and that temple alone – will be opened. And likewise you conduct a referendum in another one’. He actually backs a Bill that was introduced at that time by one Ranga Iyer in the Central legislature.

So those are the kind of efforts being made, you know through those ‘30s. It was very half-hearted, it was not something which said, ‘No, Untouchables or whoever was considered Untouchable cannot be stopped from entering temples because they are as much Hindus as Brahmins’.

No, he was not willing to go that far. He was willing to do it in a very incremental manner. As a mass leader, his compulsion was to be not too far ahead of public opinion. In his own personal life, he was quite radical: in his own ashram, he would not follow any of these varna rules, he would himself participate in the task of cleaning toilets, and so on and so forth. He would adopt a Dalit girl as his daughter and so on.

But in his public persona, he was different. He was forced to be very cautious and appear very conservative so that he did not appear too reckless or too radical. So, this dichotomy you see in Gandhi is all very fascinating to discover.

This dichotomy in Gandhi, which you have referred to in the book as “Gandhi's balancing act”, was basically his bid to woo people's hearts and he did not want to take any radical steps.

But a very contrasting approach was taken by Ambedkar, and any discussion on India's fight against caste obviously cannot be complete without discussing Ambedkar. So you have written about how the two had a couple of differences about approaching the issues of… whether it was temple entry or how depressed classes would get representation.

If you could tell us how these differences kind of played out and what were their positions on which they… while Ambedkar was seen more of a radical in that sense, Gandhi was more of a moderate. So if you could explain that a little bit?

See, they had their own trajectories, their own learning curve, so to say. During the ‘20s, Ambedkar was not anywhere as radical as he was in the ‘30s, you know. He was quite keen on exploring the possibility of finding an honourable, dignified place for Dalits within the Hindu fold.

One such step was, as I said, the 1929 Bill that he drafted, and then, the following year, he himself led a temple entry movement in the Kalaram temple in Nashik. And that proved to be quite a turning point for him, because he sees the vehemence with which Hindus, conservative Hindus, push back against it. And there was even violence.

And that was not the first time he was seeing… In 1927, he had a similar experience, that was in Mahad, with respect to throwing open a lake, a tank as it was called, the Chavadar Tank, to Dalits.

So there again, there was violence and so on. And he on that occasion does go to the extent of even burning pages from Manusmriti, right, as a mark of protest. But then since that is not quite considered a religious scripture like, say, the Bhagavad Gita is, it did not still mean that he had given up on Hinduism. As his subsequent actions showed, he even participated in an event in which he experimented with the idea of making Dalits wear a janeu (sacred thread).

So these are the kinds of things he was doing in the 1920s. And that culminated in that temple entry movement in Nashik and the reaction he faced, the opposition he faced, disenchanted him. It went on for quite some time, but you know while he was negotiating with Gandhi on representation – whether it should be a separate electorate or joint electorate and stuff like that – he had first encountered Gandhi in the Second Round Table conference, and then that led to the McDonald Award in which Dalits were given a separate electorate, and then that led to the Poona Pact, in which he gives up that right.

So, Gandhi then – among other things – tries to deal with the question of temple entry. But by then, Ambedkar had moved on. He was not interested in temple entry anymore because of his experience at Nashik. He was now more focused on capitalising on what came out of the Poona Pact – which is that there will not be a separate electorate but there will be electoral reservations. And he was happy with the fact that there were many more than he originally had in mind, that were reserved for the Scheduled Castes. That term was yet to come into force, it came into force only under the 35 Act.

Now, these are the kind of trajectories that they were going through. And in the beginning, he [Ambedkar] was very happy with the fact that Gandhi gave in to the issue of reserved constituencies. Because what happened was, in the Round Table Conference, Gandhi was opposed to not just a separate electorate but he said no question of even reserved constituencies. "You leave it to the Goodwill of Hindus, they will take good care of Untouchables." So that was a position that he had taken in the Round Table Conference. And Ambedkar, given his own lived experience of how there was opposition to any kind of reform at every step, he said, "No that can't be left to the goodwill of upper caste Hindus. So you have to have something that is codified, some concession has to be made."

Then finally it came out in the form of the Poona Pact, in which they met halfway. Ambedkar gives up on his [demand for a] separate electorate and then Gandhi concedes on reserved seats, which is a system that we still have and the origins of which are in the Poona Pact. In the initial phase, as I said, Ambedkar had his own learning curve. He was very excited. He thought he pulled off a great coup, but then it didn't take long for him to realise that these reserved constituencies would mean that only those Dalits who were acceptable to the majority of the electorate, which is caste Hindus only they would get elected. It's not as if a radical Dalit would be readily embraced by caste Hindus who constitute the majority of the electorate. So he realised that – and he was very disenchanted with that. By the time constitution making began, the kind of positions he had begun to take in the mid-40s was, "We have to get back to a separate electorate."

He was so disenchanted by then with this experiment with reserved constituencies. But then, he goes on to become the law minister of the country and then become the chairman of the Drafting Committee. So all those positions moderate his own opinion on those aspects. Finally, what we have is what was initiated by the Poona Pact, that is reserved constituencies. And then it was also extended to reservations in educational institutions and jobs and so on.

But as you mentioned, what Ambedkar struggled to get in terms of legal reforms pre-independence, he somewhat managed to get post-independence because of the positions that he hel as the chairperson of the Drafting Committee of the Indian constitution. But finally, post-independence, India did make laws to end untouchability and kind of bring an end to caste discrimination. And finally in 1989, we had the Prevention of Atrocities Against SC/ST Act, but in the book, you mentioned even after that, there have been so many instances of mass violence against the Dalits.

Whether it was in the 1960s in Kilvenmani or Bathani Tola, atrocities have continued despite laws, specific laws, coming in to end injustice. This brings into question the whole legal struggle that has gone on for the past 200, over 200 years. So, in your opinion where has Independent India gone wrong and where do we go from here?

Great question. Because if you only look at what is there in the statute book, you won't get a sense of where this deeply ingrained prejudice was coming from. On the other hand, if you look at the legal history that preceded this enactment, you will then get a sense of why there is still so much impunity. The kind of violence that we saw post-independence was something that Gandhi in his lifetime did not see – violence targeting Dalits. Even Ambedkar did not see. Ambedkar passed away in 56. And for that matter, even Nehru – who passed away in 64 – did not see. Because the first such instance of mass violence targeting Dalits took place in Kilvenmani, as you said, in 1968. And that set the template – not only for violence, for mass violence – it was an instance in which some 42 women and children belonging to the Dalit community were burnt alive, and they were all found in one room, all packed into one small room in a hut.

But there was no proper investigation, no questions were answered by any of those judgments as to why so many of them were packed into one room; who forced them into that one room; why they couldn't escape; who was stopping them from escaping. Nothing, none of that. On the contrary, what you see is that the Madras high court acquits all the ones who were convicted by the trial court and goes on to make some very classist statements that are hard to believe. This was the kind of sensitivity – or the lack of it – that India was displaying in the 70s, that said, ‘it's hard to believe that people who are so well off, who have owned cars would be party to such violence, or would be part of those mobs’.

But this is the kind of tendency, this is the kind of mindset that India displayed, and that is what led to more and more such instances of violence – because of the template that Kilvenmani set, not only for violence but also for impunity [because the] courts, the way they let off these killers.

So that's what led finally to the more stringent law, the 1989 law, and that came during Rajiv Gandhi's last year in power. But it again showed that no matter how much you reform the law, how much you tighten the law – it's a step forward for sure – but when it comes to enforcement, there are so many loopholes that people find, and ultimately, there's very little by way of justice. And to understand that, you need to go into this history. Because history shows, the legal history of these caste reforms shows, that many of these things that were done around the time of independence or post-independence, were all done out of sheer experience – there was no change of heart, there was no remorse.

On that note, thank you so much for joining us. It's a very interesting point that you have ended with, that the battles for equality were not just between the upper caste and lower caste but it was also within the upper caste, within sections of progressives, sections of moderates, sections of certain people who were more radical than the others. For all this and more, please do read this book if you want to gain more insight into how legal reforms were conducted in India and how we have come to where we are today, and why the impunity against caste injustice continues until this day.

Thank you so much for joining us at The Wire.

Thank you, Sravasti.

Transcribed by Adi Roy.

The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.