CHAPTER 22
CHRONOLOGY
1772-1833 Rammohun Roy lives; 1828 he founds Brahmo Samaj
1824-1883 Dayananda Sarasvati lives; 1875 he founds Arya Samaj
1869-1948 Mahatma Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi lives
1861-1941 Rabindranath Tagore lives
1919 Amritsar massacre takes place
1947 Independence and Partition happen
[Version A] After they had performed their superstitious ceremonies,
they placed the woman on the pile with the corpse, and set fire to the
wood. As soon as the flames touched her, she jumped off the pile. Immediately
the brahmuns seized her, in order to put her again into the
flames: she exclaimed—“Do not murder me! I do not wish to be burnt!”
The Company’s officers being present, she was brought home safely.
Missionary Register, March 18201
[Version B] What most surprised me, at this horrid and barbarous rite, was the tranquility of the woman, and the joy expressed by her relations, and the spectators. . . . She underwent everything with the greatest intrepidity, and her countenance seemed, at times, to be animated with pleasure, even at the moment when she was ascending the fatal pile.
J. S. Stavorinus (a Dutch admiral who visited Bengal in 1769 and 1770), 17702
WOMEN: SUTTEE UNDER BRITISH EYES
How can the same act, performed by two different women fifty years apart, elicit such contrasting descriptions and responses? Since the first European accounts, both Europeans and Indians have expressed widely differing opinions about the practice that Anglo-Indian English called suttee, the action of certain women in India who were burned alive on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands. (Sanskrit and Hindi texts call the woman who commits the act a sati, “good woman.”) Suttee had been around for quite a while before the Raj, as we have seen. Several queens commit suttee in the Mahabharata, and the first-century BCE Greek author Diodorus Siculus mentions suttee in his account of the Punjab. In the Buddhist Vessantara Jataka, based on a story shared by Hindus and Buddhists, when Vessantara is about to leave his queen and go into exile without her, she protests: “Burning on a fire, uniting in a single flame—such a death is better for me than life without you.”3 This imagery of wives so faithful that (to paraphrase St. Paul) they’d rather burn than unmarry (by being parted from their husbands in the next life) is part of the discourse of marital love even before it becomes a practice or is associated with funeral pyres. Such stories take to the extreme the sort of self-sacrifice normally expressed by relatively milder habits such as following husbands into exile, as both Sita and Draupadi do. On the other hand, a late chapter of the Padma Purana (perhaps c. 1000 CE) says that Kshatriya women are noble if they immolate themselves but that Brahmin women may not and that anyone who helps a Brahmin woman do it is committing Brahminicide.4
In the Muslim period, the Rajputs practiced jauhar (a kind of prophylactic suttee, the wife immolating herself before the husband’s expected death in battle), most famously at Chitorgarh, to save women from a fate worse than death at the hands of conquering enemies. Numerous sati stones, memorials to the widows who died in this way, are found all over India; one of the earliest definitively dated records is a 510 CE inscription from Eran, in Madhya Pradesh. Most of the suttees seem to occur at first in royal Kshatriya families and later among Brahmins in Bengal, but women of all castes could do it. In 1823, for example, 234 Brahmin women, 25 Kshatriyas, 14 Vaishyas, and 292 Shudras were recorded as satis.5
To a Euro-American, such women are widows, though from the Hindu standpoint, a sati is the opposite of a widow. A widow is a bad woman; since it is a wife’s duty to keep her husband alive, it is ultimately her fault if he dies and dishonorable for her to outlive him; to the degree to which she internalizes these traditional beliefs, she suffers both shame and guilt in her widowhood. A sati, by contrast, is a good woman, who remains a wife always and never a widow, since her husband is not regarded as dead until he is cremated (or, occasionally, buried), and she goes with him to heaven.6
Different scholars confronting suttee, like the blind men who encountered the elephant in the middle of the room, see a different beast depending on what part they grasp.7 Onekk calls it a sacrifice and asks: What were the ancient and persistent traditions that drove some widows to do it voluntarily and other men and women to force other widows to do it involuntarily? Anotherkl calls it murder and asks: Can suttee be explained by the more general mistreatment of women by men in India, particularly female infanticide and dowry murders of daughters-in-law (killing one wife so that the man can marry another and get another dowry)? Anotherkm calls it widow burning and asks: Why did the British first loudly denounce suttee, then covertly sanction it, and then officially ban it? This chapter will be concerned primarily with this third question, though we cannot ignore the other two and will begin with them. We will then consider similar complexities that dog the Raj record on issues such as cow protection, (non)violence, addiction to opium and alcohol, and the treatment of the lowest castes.
DID SHE JUMP OR WAS SHE PUSHED?
Eyewitnesses, both English and Indian, speak with different voices, sometimes of coercion—of women who tried to run away at the last minute and were dragged back, held down with bamboo poles, and weighted down with heavy logs designed to keep them from escaping—and sometimes of willing, joyous submission. But the one voice that we most want to hear in this story seems to be missing: the voice of the woman in the fire. To Gayatri Spivak’s ovular question, “Can the subaltern speak?” (the subaltern being in this case the disenfranchised woman), my answer is yes. But that does not mean that we can hear her speak. The satis who are said to have wanted to die and succeeded did not live to tell the tale; the balance of extant testimony is therefore intrinsically slanted in favor of those who successfully escaped. Their voices tell us that the widow was forced to do it (by relatives who wanted her jewelry or feared that she would dishonor them by becoming promiscuous) or that she preferred an early, violent death (often very early indeed, as many were widowed in their early teens) to the hardships of the life of a widow in India. Thus, in dramatic contrast with the multivocality of all the other players in this grim drama, almost every widow whose speech is noted by the colonial records is said to have given the same explanation: material suffering. Economic hardships may indeed have contributed to the spread of suttee. But this argument, that suttee occurred because widows had nothing, is contradicted by the argument that it occurred precisely because they had too much; the larger incidence of suttee among the Brahmins of Bengal, particularly from 1680 to 1830, was due indirectly to the Dayabhaga system of law that prevailed in Bengal, where, unlike in most of the rest of India, widows were entitled to their husbands’ share of family lands and wealth8—wealth that would revert to the sati’s husband’s family after her death.
There were also religious reasons for a woman, or her relatives, to choose suttee. Many observers, both English and Indian, testified that women insisted on performing suttee, despite serious attempts, by both British officials and Indian relatives, to dissuade them. What was the religious ideology that might have motivated either the woman herself or the people forcing her to do it, or both? A woman might perform such an action for her own, personal, religious reasons (rebirth in heaven, or Release) or nonreligious reasons (depression, guilt, hardship, the desire to honor her husband and her family or to ensure a better life for her children) or involuntarily for someone else’s nonreligious reasons (the reasons of her family, forcing her to do it so that they could get her money) or for their religious reasons (to satisfy their own ideas about the afterlife). Some women, as we shall see, even used suttee as a weapon of moral coercion to reform their husbands.
The crass Materialist hypothesis hardly does credit either to these women or to their religion; to argue that all of the satis were coerced, either driven to suicide or simply murdered, makes them victims rather than free agents, victims of male ventriloquism or false consciousness, an uncomfortable position for either a feminist or a relativist to assume. Taking the religious claims seriously gives the satis a marginally greater measure of what feminists call agency and I would call subjective dignity. It views them as individuals who made choices, who believed in what they were doing. The religious goal of some of these women may have been what they said it was: rebirth with their husband in heaven or again on earth or ultimate Release from rebirth. Some of them probably meant it when they said they wanted to die with their husbands (death for a Hindu is a very different prospect than it is for Christians and Jews), and feminists have taught us that it is sexist to disregard women’s words.
Every ritual needs its myth, and the image of the suttee as sacrifice is supported by two myths, neither of which in fact describes an act of suttee. The first is the ancient Sanskrit tale of the goddess Sati, who entered a fire that was, significantly, not the pyre of her husband, Shiva, who never dies: She spontaneously ignited herself in protest when her father, Daksha, failed to invite Shiva to his sacrifice. A second myth, often used to justify the claim that a true sati does not suffer, is the tale of Sita, who entered a fire (again, not her husband’s pyre) to prove her chastity and felt its flames as cool as sandalwood. The mythology of the ordeal by fire implied that, like Sita, a truly “good woman” would feel no pain (and many of the reports, including British reports, insisted that the women did not feel any pain), proving that she was not guilty of infidelity or any other failure as a wife, and if she did suffer, she was assured, her pain would destroy the bad karma of her evident guilt. But a suttee differs significantly from an ordeal; guilty or innocent, the sati cannot survive. And these myths were twisted into support for the idea of widows’ immolation only at a fairly late date, while other mythological women were sometimes taken as paradigmatic satis instead.9
Any explanation of suttee must address the essential question of gender. True, there are many instances, in both myth and history, of Hindu men who sacrificed themselves in fire, but not on the pyres of their wives. Why not? The answer to this question must contextualize suttee as an aspect of the more general male desire to control women’s sexuality, in which light suttee emerges not merely as a religious tradition but as a crime against women who are the scapegoats of a sexist society. Since Hindu texts blamed women for the sexual weakness of men, one danger posed by a widow was that she was a loose cannon, a hazard both to men and to her family, which she would dishonor were she unfaithful to her dead husband.
The traits of sexism are, however, recognizably cross-cultural; women have been beaten to death by their husbands and even burned alive (sometimes as witches) in countries where there is no suttee mythology of women and fire. To explain why the abuse of women takes the particular form that suttee assumes in India, we must therefore invoke, after all, the powers of a religious mythology of marriage, death, and rebirth. Once again we need a Zen diagram, allowing for the intersection of Materialist, feminist, and religious concerns.
Are we forced, after all, to choose between crass materialism and religious self-justification? I think not. Here we must consider the question of women’s subjectivity, the subaltern’s voice. These women were not a homogeneous group of mindless victims or soulless fanatics, but individuals who made various choices for various reasons and had many voices and cannot be sorted into two tidy groups of those who jumped and those who were pushed. Some were murdered for land or money or family honor; some sacrificed themselves for religious reasons; some committed suicide out of guilt, despair, or terror. Some resisted, and ran away, and lived to tell the tale; some tried to resist and failed; some tried to die and failed; some were unable to resist; some did not want to resist. What they all had in common is what they reacted to, the culture, the ideal of what a woman should be and do, a story that they all knew, though some believed it and some did not. That culture too was hardly monolithic; the woman who so impressed the Dutch admiral in 1770 was up against forces very different from those faced by the women who grew up singing ballads praising the immolation of entire royal households in Rajasthan or by those who learned on television about the much publicized, and protested, suttee of a woman named Rup Kanwar on September 4, 1987, at Deorala, in Rajasthan.
RAMMOHUN ROY AND THE BRAHMO SAMAJ
With these issues in mind, we can go back and consider what some people in nineteenth-century India tried to do about suttee.
Raja Rammohun Roy (1774-1833), a Bengali Brahmin who knew Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, in addition to his native Bangla (Bengali), was a major voice raised in opposition to suttee. Roy read the scriptures of many religions, only to find, he said, that there was not much difference between them. In 1814 he settled in Calcutta, where he was prominent in the movement that advocated education of a Western type, urging Hindus to learn mathematics, natural philosophy, chemistry, anatomy, and “other useful sciences.”10
Roy always wore the sacred thread that marked him as a Brahmin, and he kept most of the customs of a Brahmin, but his theology was surprisingly eclectic. (He may also have been the first Hindu to use the word “Hinduism,” in 1816.11) His intense belief in strict monotheism and his aversion to the sort of image worship that characterized Puranic Hinduism (puja, temple worship, pilgrimage) began early and may have been derived from a combination of monistic elements of Upanishadic Hinduism, then Islam and, later, eighteenth-century deism (belief in a transcendent Creator God reached through reason), Unitarianism (belief in God’s essential oneness), and the ideas of the Freemasons (a secret fraternity that espoused some deistic concepts). He was one of the first upper-class Hindus to visit Europe, where he made a great hit with the intelligentsia of Britain and France. In 1828 he founded the Brahmo Samaj (“Society of God”), based on the doctrines of the Upanishads, several of which he had translated into Bangla in 1825.12
Roy wrote two tracts against suttee, publishing each first in Bangla and then in his own English translation. The first was A Conference between an Advocate for, and an Opponent of the Practice of Burning Widows Alive, which he published in two parts, in 1818 and 1820.13 It was written in the form of a dialogue between an advocate and his opponent—the classical Hindu bow to diverse arguments. Roy denounced suttee from the standpoint of scripture and Hindu law,14 arguing against it even when it was voluntary and, as such, faithful to “the scriptures”; he advocated ascetic widowhood instead.15 Though he was unwilling to endorse government interference in matters of religion, his writings may have been a major factor prompting the British to take action against suttee in 1829. In 1830 Roy published a tract entitled Abstract of the Arguments Regarding the Burning of Widows Considered as a Religious Rite and, later, Brief Remarks Regarding Modern Encroachments on the Ancient Rights of Females, a tract on women’s rights to property (a right that married women did not have in England until 1882), based on a reading of both the main commentary on Manu (by Mitakshara) and Dayabhaga law (the Bengal marriage code).
After Roy’s death in 1833, Debendranath Tagore became leader of the Brahmo Samaj and, like Roy, vigorously opposed the practice of suttee, as did his son Rabindranath (though Rabindranath “treated the ideas behind it respectfully”). 16 The third leader of the Brahmo Samaj, Keshab Chunder Sen, abolished caste in the society and admitted women as members.
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
As for the British, on the issue of reform in general and suttee in particular, they were divided in several ways. Edmund Burke, a conservative, insisted that India was fine as it was, admired its religion and customs, and advised a hands-off policy; he sided with Sir William Jones and the Orientalists, who wanted to educate Indians in their own tongues and their own literatures, and he led the move to impeach Warren Hastings. On the other side, James Mill, a liberal, insisted that India suffered from arrested development and that the British had a duty to intervene and interfere; the Utilitarians sided as usual with Anglicists such as Macaulay, who wanted to teach the Indians about European literatures, in European languages, but on this issue of interference, they also sided with the evangelicals. The colonial bureaucrats were divided on the political costs of intervening in suttee, the Baptist missionaries took very different stances in addressing British and Indian audiences, and European eyewitness accounts of widow burning ricocheted between horror and fascination. One can hardly speak of a European consensus.
The two basic factions among the British also aligned themselves along the divide between, on the one hand, the basic terms of Cornwallis’s pact in 1793, the promise not to interfere in religion in India (an early antecedent of Star Trek’s prime directive), sympathetic to the Orientalist/Conservative position, and, on the other hand, ideas of universal human rights, which often amounted to their desire to bring Enlightenment rationality to India, the Anglicist position (or even to bring Christianity to them, the evangelical position). The debate over whether suttee was religious (which also argued that it was painless; version B, above: She felt no pain, she really believed it, went willingly) or secular political/economic (and therefore painful; version A: They murdered her, presumably for the money, and she fought and screamed) meant that the British were driving with one foot on the brake and one on the accelerator: If suttee was religious, the prime directive would keep the British out; if it was secular, murder was being committed, and it was the duty of the British to prevent the Hindus from burning their women.
The Hindus were also divided in complex ways, and the grounds shifted in the arguments that they made for and against suttee in response to colonial discourse. The British thought that the various Hindu reform movements canceled one another out,17 but they misunderstood the nature of Hinduism; each side raged on against the other(s), gaining rather than losing strength from the opposition. On one side were those who supported a strict enforcement of the caste system, held on to their old ways, and opposed any change in caste customs, including antisuttee legislation. On another side were the radicals, who included in their ranks both militant Hindus, who advocated violence, and college-educated students who renounced Hinduism, aped the British, became Anglophile Christians, ate beef and drank beer. Somewhere in between the extremes of both Indians and Europeans, Rammohun Roy and the Indian Liberal movement opposed child marriages and suttee, preached nonviolence, and tried to build a new world that would combine the best of Hindu and Christian/British values.
The national press in India nowadays marches “in lockstep with the colonial legislator who abolished the custom of widow-burning in 1829.”18 Nationalist historians, despite their otherwise anticolonial bias, have accepted this part of the colonial viewpoint, thus aligning themselves with the Christian missionaries, whom they otherwise generally despise. On the left are the new, secular Indian elites, who engage in “internal colonialism” by protesting against the backlash of a Hinduism that they stigmatize as superstitious, socially retrograde, and obscurantist. On the right are the other sort of nationalist who use suttee as the banner of “Hindu-tva” (Hinduness) to oppress not only women but Muslims and dissidents.
Fast-forward: When it comes to suttee, we too are strange bedfellows, caught between two contemporary value systems. On the one hand, the increasingly popular concept of universal human rights challenges previous scholarly attempts to be value free and brings its adherents uncomfortably close to the camp of the British. On the other hand, such values as moral relativism or respect for other cultures condemn the British as white men saving brown women from brown men.kn19 Allan Bloom, in his conservative bookThe Closing of the American Mind (1987), began his attack on moral relativism with the example of suttee: “If I pose the routine questions designed to confute [the students] and make them think, such as, ‘If you had been a British administrator in India, would you have let the natives under your governance burn the widow at the funeral of a man who had died?,’ they either remain silent or reply that the British should not have been there in the first place.”20 I disagree. Some years ago, when I was invited to teach a class about India to a group of high school students on the South Side of Chicago, I told them about suttee and put Bloom’s question to them, and their unanimous reply was: “I would not interfere; I would not mess with someone else’s religion.” This answer, which shocked me at the time, came, I eventually realized, out of the Chicago students’ own experience of identity politics. But moving beyond the chauvinist British attitude (white men saving brown women from brown men) and then also beyond the relativist reaction (“I would not mess with someone else’s religion”), we might aspire to a more complex synthesis, balancing our respect for the Hindus as complex moral beings, many of whom protested against suttee, with our own sense of human rights. The best we can do is to question the deeper motives of the British, the Hindus, and ourselves.
THE RAJ RIDES TO THE RESCUE
Others before Rammohun Roy, including Akbar and Jahangir, had tried in vain to curtail suttee, and the British involvement in such reforms came from such mixed impulses that it was foredoomed to miscarry.
Every British schoolchild was once taught the story: “In 1829 the British government in India put an end to the Hindu practice of suttee, their moral outrage at this barbaric violation of human rights outweighing their characteristic liberal tolerance of the religious practices of people under their benign rule.” But almost every element in this credo is false. True, a law was passed in India in 1829 making it illegal for widows to be burned with their husbands, but moral outrage was not the predominant factor in the British decision to outlaw suttee, nor did they succeed in ending it. On the contrary, the fear of offending high-caste Hindus serving in the British army and civil service, and concern about the political costs of legal interdiction, had led the British for many years to sanction suttee under some circumstances (as long as the woman had no childrenko and persuaded the magistrate that she was acting of her own free will), thus effectively encouraging it by giving it a legal support it had never had before, making it a colonially enhanced atavism.
In 1680 the Governor of Madras prevented the burning of a Hindu widow, and ten years later an Englishman in Calcutta was said to have rescued a Brahmin widow from the flames of her husband’s funeral pyre and taken her as his common-law wife.21 After that the British generally looked the other way where suttee was concerned. The same Orientalist spirit that led the British to mistake the idea for the reality, wrongly assuming that Hindus were following the dharma-shastras, led them to believe that they should not hinder but help the Hindus do as their scriptures dictated, and do it right. As usual they reached for Manu, but when for once he let them down—Manu is big on ascetic widowhood but does not mention suttee—they found some Bengali scholars who argued that the part of Manu advocating the burning of widows had somehow been left out of the Bengal manuscripts, so they helpfully put it back in.22 (Most of the dharma texts do not mention suttee, concentrating instead on ascetic widowhood; several condemn it in no uncertain terms; and a few late commentaries kp argue for it.23) And so, on April 20, 1813 (the same year the missionaries were allowed in), a British circular proclaimed that suttee was meant to be voluntary and that it would be permitted in cases in which it was countenanced by the Hindu religion and prevented when the religious authorities prohibited it, as when the woman was less than sixteen years old, pregnant, intoxicated (a point worth noting), or otherwise coerced. In fact, there was a dramatic increase in the number of suttees from 1815 to 1818, the first three years of data collection and the first five years after the circular was published; the toll went from 378 to 839 cases. After that, the numbers declined and then fluctuated between 500 and 600. The 1817-1818 cholera epidemic may have increased the numbers, with more men dead and more widows to die with them, or the clerks may have refined their methods of data collection. But there was also a suspicion that the numbers grew because of government intervention: They had authorized it (their work made it seem as if “a legal suttee was better than an illegal one”) and given it interest and celebrity (so that, as in the case of Rup Kanwar in 1987, there were copycat suttees).24
And when the British did intervene in suttee, the results were often counterproductive. For instance:
THE SLOW-BURNING FIRE
A certain Captain H. D. Robertson, Collector of Poona in 1828, learned that a botched suttee had allowed the pyre to burn too slowly, causing the would-be sati to escape in agony. She requested that they try again; again it was botched; British officers finally intervened, and she died twenty hours later. Robertson investigated and determined that “Hindu scriptures” did stipulate that such slow-burning grass should be used, though it seldom was. He decided that if the British were to insist that this text be obeyed to the letter, the realization that suttee would now invariably produce a slow burn, increasing the agony, would discourage women from undertaking it. But one woman did still commit suttee, despite attempts to dissuade her, and Robertson was zealous in carrying out what he saw as his duty.25
What Joseph Conrad called the reformer’s compassion here went horribly awry.
Finally, in 1829, the year after Robertston’s intervention, several years after prominent Brahmins had already spoken up against suttee, and at a time when there were many Indians in the legislature and William Bentinck, an evangelical sympathizer, was Governor-General (1828-1835), the desire to justify their continuing paternalistic rule over Indians whom they characterized as savage children led the British to ban suttee altogether, as well as child marriage, with much self-aggrandizing fanfare.
The British law probably facilitated more women’s deaths than it saved, and its main effect was to stigmatize Hinduism as an abomination in Christian eyes.26 Suttee is a pornographic image, the torture of a woman by fire, hot in every sense of the word. Relatively few women died that way, in contrast with the hundreds, even thousands who died every day of starvation and malnutrition, but suttee had PR value. Thus the Raj had it both ways, boasting both that it did not interfere with other people’s religions and that it defended human rights. The debate, in both India and Britain, turned what had been an exceptional practice into a symbol of the oppression of all Indian women and the moral bankruptcy of Hinduism. Nor did the 1829 law, or, for that matter, the new legislation enacted by India after its Independence put an end to it; at least forty widows have burned since 1947, most of them largely ignored until the suttee of Rup Kanwar in 1987 became a cause célèbre, and some even now attested only in obscure local archives.
ROMANCING SUTTEE
Some of the British, sympathetic to one Hindu view, compared the satis with Christian martyrs or the heroic suicides at Masada—death rather than dishonor, better dead than red, and so forth. Other Europeans romanticized suttee in other ways. Abraham Roger, in 1670, recorded a local story:
INDRA TESTS A SATI
Indra, the Vedic king of the gods, came to earth as a man and visited a whore, to test her faith. He paid her well and they made love all night. In the morning, he pretended to be dead, and she wished to be burned with him, despite the protests of her parents, who pointed out that she was not even the man’s legitimate wife. When the pyre was ready, Indra woke up, announced that it was just a trick, and took her to his heavenly world.27
We have seen Indra’s tricks before, but this Dutch author apparently has not. He mistakes suttee for the practice of a woman of the night, rather than the act of a chaste wife. Voltaire (who had gotten India wrong before) also seems to have missed the point: In Zadig(1747), he imagined a heroine about to commit suttee and suggested the enactment of a law forcing widows to spend an hour with a young man before deciding to sacrifice themselves. And an eighteenth-century French comic opera presented a Frenchman in India whose wife, an Indian woman who was unfaithful to him, feigned drowning in the hope that her husband would throw himself on her pyre.28
Richard Wagner staged suttee in his opera Götterdämmerung by having his heroine, Brünnhilde, ride her horse onto the flaming pyre of her beloved Siegfried. kq In an early draft of the opera (summer of 1856), Brünnhilde spouts a kind of garbled Vedanta (via the philosopher Schopenhauer, who had read Indian philosophy in German): “I leave the Land of Desire, I flee the Land of Illusion forever; I close behind me the open door of eternal Becoming. . . . Freed from rebirth, everything eternal . . . I saw the world end.”29Thus some Europeans glorified the custom of suttee.
ANIMALS: DAYANAND SARASVATI, THE ARYA SAMAJ, AND COW PROTECTION
Since women and cows are closely linked in the Hindu imaginary, through the trope of purity, let us turn now to the issue of cow protection, which was the banner of the Arya Samaj even as suttee was for the Brahmo Samaj.
Dayanand Sarasvati (1824-1883) was trained as a yogi but steadily lost faith in yoga. He claimed to base his doctrines on the four Vedas as the eternal word of god and judged later Hindu scriptures critically, denouncing image worship, sacrifice, and polytheism. After traveling widely as an itinerant preacher, in 1875 he founded the Arya Samaj, which rapidly gained ground in western India. Dayananda insisted that “those who read or listen to the Bible, Quran, Purana, false accounts, and poetic theory—books of ideas opposed to the Veda—they become sensuous and depraved.”30The Arya Samaj further developed the ceremony for “reconversion”kr (called purification [shuddhi]) to bring “back” to the Vedic fold some Muslims who had never been Hindus at all, as well as to reconvert some recent Hindu converts to Islam.31 They used the same ceremony to “purify” Pariah castes.32 And they sought to distinguish themselves, as Aryans, from Hindus, who in their view (as in the British view) practiced a degraded form of Vedic religion.33
In 1893 internal disputes caused the Arya Samaj to split into two parties, sometimes called the Flesh-eating and Vegetarian parties. But the issue of vegetarianism arose before that in 1881, when Dayanand published a treatise called Ocean of Mercy for the Cow (go-karuna-nidhi), and in 1882, when he founded a committee for the protection of cows from slaughter. For the next decade the Arya Samaj established cow protection societies all over British India. The first agitation over cow slaughter in the Raj took place in a Sikh state of the Punjab where cow slaughter had been a capital offense right up to the moment when the British took over.34 From then on, the issue challenged the legitimacy of British rule, though the immediate violence was directed against Muslims who killed cows, as they did during the Bakr-Id festival and after pilgrimages (though goats could also be sacrificed). The same debate that hedged British interference in suttee (if it was religious, they should not interfere, but if it was secular, they should) also hedged cow protection.35 In 1888 a British court in Allahabad ruled that a cow was not a sacred object, that Muslims who slaughtered cows could not be held to have insulted the religion of the Hindus, and that police were to protect Muslims who wanted to slaughter cows.
Cow protection societies continued to form the major plank of the Arya Samaj movement in North India, and cow slaughter was specifically used to justify violence against Pariahs and Muslims. Popular ballads and stories highlighted Kshatriya virtues embodied in acts of saving cows from the assaults of Muslim butchers, to whom Pariahs such as Chamars allegedly supplied cows. At the Bakr-Id festival of 1893, riots broke out involving the entire Hindu population of villages, and thousands of people attacked Muslims. In the 1920s, communal riots occurred around symbols of the cow. Cows continued to provide a lightning rod for communal violence from then until the present day.
VIOLENCE AND NONVIOLENCE
VIOLENCE: DYER AT AMRITSAR
After World War I, India was a different world, but still the iconic massacres, like those surrounding the 1857 Rebellion, continued. It was 1919. There had been fierce protests against British rule, an orgy of arson and violence that left five Europeans dead. The British forbade all meetings and demonstrations. A peaceful group assembled in Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, an open space hemmed in by houses, to celebrate the feast day of Baisakhi. Brigadier General Reginald Dyer marched his troops in and, without any warning, gave the order to fire on the crowd; they ceased firing only when they ran out of ammunition. Because the British were blocking the only gate to the enclosure, the crowd was trapped. More than twelve hundred men, women, and children were seriously wounded, and three to five hundred were killed.
Dyer, who already had a reputation for brutality (he had had prisoners beaten, sometimes in public, and made Indians crawl on the street), was proud of what he had done. The House of Lords passed a measure commending him, and he was designated a “defender of the Empire.” Nor was he ever punished.ks But Winston Churchill referred to the massacre as “a monstrous event,” the British press expressed shocked outrage, and Dyer’s action was condemned worldwide. The House of Commons officially censured him, and he resigned in 1920. Tagore returned his Nobel Prize, and Nehru’s father abandoned his Savile Row suits and took to wearing Gandhian homespun.36
And the rest, as they say, is history: Indian nationalists, under the banner of the Congress Party, succeeded, after decades of often violent Indian protests and equally violent British reprisals (both imprisonments and executions), in winning independence from the British in 1947.
NONVIOLENCE: GANDHI
One of the key figures in the independence movement was Mahatma Gandhi, who reacted to Amritsar with one of his fasts against the British. Pleading for an honorable and equal partnership between Britain and India, held not by force but “by the silken cord of love,” he argued: “Fasting can only be resorted to against a lover, not to extort rights but to reform him, as when a son fasts for a father who drinks. My fast at Bombay and then at Bardoli was of that character. I fasted to reform, say, General Dyer, who not only does not love me, but who regards himself as my enemy.”37
Gandhi frequently used fasting as a weapon to reform (or coerce) others; on one occasion, he fasted to get Congress to agree to regard the Pariahs (whom he called Harijans [People of God]) as a Hindu community, and he succeeded; separate Harijan electorates were abolished, and more seats were reserved exclusively for Harijan members.38 Fasting, in the dharma texts, was usually a restoration for sins and errors, and Gandhi always had a strong sense of his own shortcomings; the fasting dealt with that too. Thus his fasting was intended first to control himself, then to control his own people, getting them to unite in protest but to pull back from violence; and then to control the British, getting them to let him out of jail on several occasions and, eventually, to quit India. He had more success with the British than with his own people.
Drawing on the nonviolent Jaina and Vaishnava traditions of his native Gujarat, Gandhi, who came from a merchant (Baniya) caste, developed the idea of what he called satya-graha—“holding firmly on to truth” (satya, like sati, derived from the verb “to be” in Sanskrit)—first in South Africa, on behalf of the Indian community there, and then in India, on behalf of the Harijans, elevating suffering and denial into a quasireligious discipline, like yoga or meditation. 39 He used fasting as a weapon of the weak40 against the British, as Indian women had used it against their husbands for centuries (often simultaneously withholding sexual access, locking themselves into the “anger room,” as Kaikeyi did in the Ramayana). Gandhi said that you cannot fast against a tyrant, that he fasted to “reform those who loved me.” Refuting the binary sexual attributes as the British generally applied them to male colonizers and feminized colonized subjects (the Rape of India syndrome), he made female fortitude, self-sacrifice, and self-control the model of national character for both men and women. Thus he invented a gendered nationalism that expressed an androgynous model of virtue,41 which he regarded as the essence of both bravery—indeed virility—and the female qualities of endurance and nonviolence.
Gandhi was a one-man strange bedfellow. His insistence on celibacy for his disciples caused difficulty among some of them, as did his habit of sleeping beside girls young enough to be called jailbait in the United States, to test and/or prove his celibate control or to stiffen his resolve. But this practice drew not so much upon the Upanishadic and Vaishnava ascetic traditions, which were the source of many of Gandhi’s practices, as upon the ancient Tantric techniques of internalizing power, indeed creating magical powers, by first stirring up the sexual energies and then withholding semen.
On the question of eating beef, Gandhi was also ambivalent. As a child he had heard popular poems recited by schoolboys: “Behold the mighty Englishman /He rules the Indian small,/Because being a meat-eater/He is five cubits tall.”42 Thus, in contradiction of the reasons to eat meat outlined in many Hindu texts, Gandhi felt as if the natural order—the laws of violence and power—required him to eat meat in order to defeat the British. But eating meat was not natural for Gandhi, who was raised in a Vaishnava family that practiced strict vegetarianism,43 in Gujarat, where Jainism was strong.
In the end Gandhi used the image of calf love (vatsalya), the love of and for a mother cow, particularly the Earth Cow, Mother Earth, as a key symbol for his imagined Indian nation, and though he also tried to include Muslims in the family, cow protection was a factor in the failure of his movement to attract large-scale Muslim support. His attitude to cows was, however, an essential component of his version of nonviolence (ahimsa), which, in Gandhi’s hands, came to mean not just opposition to blood sacrifice but what others called passive kt nonresistance44 and I would call passive-aggressive nonresistance, against the British, without spilling their blood any more than an adherent of traditional ahimsa would spill the blood of a sacrificial animal.
Gandhi was well aware that there had never been true nonviolence in India (or anywhere else, for that matter). He once remarked, “Indeed the very word, nonviolence, a negative word, means that it is an effort to abandon the violence that is inevitable in life.”45 If you’ve read this far, you will know that Gandhi could not simply pick up off the rack a nonviolence already perfected by centuries of Hindu meditation; it was a much-disputed concept. Gandhi had to reinvent nonviolence before he could use it in an entirely new situation, as a political strategy, against the British Raj. But he had a rich tradition to draw upon. Writing about the Gita, Gandhi granted, “It may be freely admitted that the Gita was not written to establish ahimsa. . . . But if the Gita believed in ahimsa or it was included in desirelessness, why did the author adopt a warlike illustration? When the Gita was written, although people believed in ahimsa, wars were not only not taboo, but no one observed the contradiction between them and ahimsa.”46
Hindu idealists gladly embraced the Gandhian hope that the Hindus might set an example for the human race in passive resistance, a hope bolstered by their desire to prove to the disdainful British that the Hindus were not the lascivious, bloodthirsty savages depicted in the colonial caricature. Thus an ancient Hindu ideal was appropriated and given new power by Hindus (such as Gandhi) who had been influenced by Western thinkers (such as Tolstoy) who were acquainted with the neo-Vedantins as well as with German idealists who had been reading the Upanishads (originally through Persian, Muslim translations), making these ideas more attractive both to Westerners and to Hindus still living under the shadow of Western domination.
But if Gandhi hoped that the ancient Hindu ideal of nonviolence, even in its modern incarnation, would succeed in the postcolonial context, he was whistling in the dark. His method succeeded against the British but could not avert the tragedy of Partition.kuGandhi’s nonviolence failed because it did not pay sufficient attention to the other, more tenacious ancient Hindu ideal that had a deeper grip on real emotions in the twentieth century: violence. For as Krishna pointed out in the Bhagavad Gita, it is quite possible to adhere to the mental principles of nonviolence while killing your cousins in battle. (Gandhi wrote a translation, into Gujarati, and commentary to the Gita in which he interpreted the Mahabharata war as symbolic and read metaphorically Krishna’s exhortations to Arjuna to kill his enemies.) The Vedantic reverence for non-violence flowered in Gandhi; the Vedic reverence for violence flowered in the slaughters that followed Partition. Then more active civil disobedience replaced passive noncooperation, and terrorism also increased. On January 30, 1948, Gandhi was shot to death by Nathuram Godse, a Pune Brahmin who had ties with the militant nationalist organization called the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or National Volunteers’ Organization).47
TAXING ADDICTION: ALCOHOL AND ADIVASIS IN GUJARAT
Gandhi was concerned with control on both the political level (control of violence) and the personal (control of sensuality). The threats to both were united in the British control of Hindu addiction to opium, for opium, along with indigo (the dye used for European uniforms) and tea, was one of the great Raj cash crops.48 The East India Company forced Indian peasants to cultivate the poppy from which opium is produced,49 which was then exported to China in exchange for silks and tea (thereby producing opium addicts in China); when the Chinese resisted, the company dispatched its Indian sepoys to fight and die for the company’s cause. But not all the opium got to China. In Kipling’s Kim, Kim’s father dies of opium and the woman he lives with sells it; Kipling speaks of “the opium that is meat, tobacco, and medicine to the spent Asiatic,” a tolerant (if racist) attitude that was, oddly enough, shared by some missionaries, who would not begrudge to the desperately poor the pill of opium that was for some, the missionaries said, their only stimulant. But Kipling neglects to mention that opium also meant death for many people. More precisely, it meant death and taxes. Before the British introduced an opium tax for the first time, opium had been untaxed and used fairly cheaply by all classes of people, in both the towns and the villages. The tax didn’t make the addicts give it up, but increased their already desperate poverty.50
Alcohol was a more pervasive problem than opium and has deeper and more complex roots in Hindu culture, but it too became a political problem under the Raj, also through a new form of taxation in Gujarat in the 1920s. What has been called the Devi movement started in South Gujarat among a group of Adivasis, a tribal group whom caste Hindus in the nineteenth century regarded as non-Hindus because they ate meat (anything but cattle and horseflesh) and drank liquor.51 (This definition conveniently ignored the fact that many Hindus ate meat and drank liquor, yet reform movements often argued that giving up meat and wine was a way of giving up being a tribal and becoming part of the four-class system.)52 More precisely, the Adivasis drank toddy (tadi), the fermented juice of a palm tree (coconut, palmyra, or date palm; in South Gujarat, it was mostly date palm), and daru, made chiefly from the flowers of the mahua tree (Madhuca indica) and said to be seven times as strong as toddy (15 to 30 percent alcohol). Both drinks were cheap to make and not very strong.53 “God gave the Brahmin ghee [clarified butter, used in Vedic sacrifices] and the Bhil [a tribal people] liquor,” a local proverb goes, and these Adivasis believed (as the Vedic Indians had) that the gods also enjoyed sharing a drink with them at various rituals. At funerals, the corpse too was given a drink. They drank toddy in part because it was so much cleaner and healthier than water, but they strongly disapproved of addictive drinking.
The Adivasis did not regard women as property but allowed them to divorce, remarry (even if widowed), and commit adultery (which they regarded as an offense but not a grave offense). And they were anti-Brahmin (some even regarded Brahmin killing as an act of merit) and regarded literacy in Hindu texts as “a cultural force which they had always done their best to keep at bay.” The Hinduism to which they were exposed in school was primarily Arya Samaj, amounting to devotion to a Hindu deity (in particular Krishna), a daily bath, and no meat, no blood sacrifice, and, worst of all, no daru or toddy.
The Adivasis had always made toddy and daru privately at home until the late nineteenth century, when the colonial and various princely states, the capitalists who manufactured liquor in central distilleries, and the liquor dealers (who in South Gujarat were almost all Parsis) combined forces to control and tax liquor, just as the British had taxed opium. But toddy is best consumed within hours of fermenting; by storing it until it could be taxed and sold, the British ruined it; by the time it got to the shops it was weak and tasteless, and expensive, and hard to get. The Parsis who sold it came to town “mounted on a fine horse with a gun and a whip”; they raped the Adivasi women and forced the girls into prostitution for touring officials. This happened so often that the Adivasis devised a ceremony of purification for women whom the Parsis had raped. Thus colonial administrators and landed castes took the Adivasis’ land, took their crops, took their women, took bribes, and exploited their labor.
Then the goddess arrived. Originally a smallpox deity (called, apotropaically, Sitala [“the Cool”] because she brought fever), she became for the Adivasis a force for social reform and a vehicle for protest against their exploiters, the Parsis. Though the Adivasis had resisted the educational forces of Hinduism and spurned the help of higher political powers when the nationalists had tried to help them, they did not reject the Higher Power of the goddess, in a move that anticipated Alcoholics Anonymous by a decade or two. The goddess possessed certain women and spoke through them, and the women then led demonstrations, courted imprisonment, and persuaded the men to refuse the tax; they held the men to the mark and goaded them on.
Speaking through the women, the Devi persuaded the men to drink tea instead of liquor, which broke their economic bondage to the Parsis. The solidarity that they had formerly expressed in communal drinking bouts they now symbolized by not drinking. Though there was a certain amount of recidivism and the occasional great debauch to celebrate a new recruit’s final renunciation, by and large it worked. They sang songs (bhajans) to Krishna, some of which exhorted them to give up liquor and stand up against the liquor dealers, while other songs (spiked by the words of the Devi herself) commanded them not to become Christians, to resist the missionaries who were active in their district.
This was not Sanskritization. Like many tribals, the Adivasis realized that they would be very low caste if they became Hindus and so did not claim a rank as a caste (though Hindus often regarded them as a caste). Some of them, however, asked to be regarded as Kshatriyas, who could maintain their high status even while indulging in impure practices such as eating meat and addictive vices such as drinking liquor. This is what has been called Rajputization or Kshatriyazation, the upward mobility of castes that do not give up their “impure” habits. But the Devi’s command to give up toddy and daru doubly empowered them by helping them simultaneously to appropriate the “purer” values of the regionally dominant high-caste Hindus and Jainas and to assert themselves against the most rapacious of the local exploiters, the Parsis.
Indeed, as the Devi movement grew in strength, the Adivasis began to treat the Parsis as Pariahs, taunting them that they should go back to Persia, and forcing Parsi women, for the first time in their lives, to do the tasks of scrubbing, sweeping, and washing. Some Adivasis refused to talk with Parsis or even be touched by them, thus, of course, perpetuating the evils of the caste system. Some Parsis and their strongmen, assisted on occasions by tax officials, retaliated by seizing Adivasis, holding them down, and pouring liquor down their throats (thus making them break their vows and become ritually impure once again) or by pouring toddy into village wells so that the Adivasis would be forced to drink alcohol with their water.
The inspiration of the Devi gave the Adivasis the courage to rebel. Unlike the priestly spokesmen of the Hinduism they had avoided in the schools, the Devi did not require them to worship gods like Krishna or Rama (though some of them did) but allowed them to go on worshiping their old gods and goddesses so long as they did not perform blood sacrifice. The goddess often became incarnate in an old buffalo cow who wandered freely from house to house, and one man became richer after the cow defecatedkv and urinated in his house.54 But there were, from the start, skeptics who regarded the cow as a public nuisance, beat her away with a stout stick, drove her out of their crops, and sold her at a public auction. And although most of the Adivasis attributed their new social activism to the goddess, they had learned that change was possible and that they could make it happen by their own actions, long after many of them decided that their supposed champion was no more than a figment of the imagination.55 The Devi took the place of the intellectuals who, in other times and places (Russia in 1917, to take a case at random), came in from outside to inspire the oppressed peasants to rebel. This was entirely a tribal movement. The myth, once again, made history possible.
The Devi movement was eventually crushed in many places, through the punishment of its leaders. Often the Devi then departed, in a formal ceremony, but sometimes the movement went on without her. In 1922 one reformer managed both to keep the villagers from drinking and to prevent animal sacrifices (by arguing that sacrificial animals and humans had the same souls). The movement became increasingly secular, and increasingly accommodating. As people noticed that those who went on drinking liquor and eating meat did not experience the divine wrath that they had been threatened with, they followed suit, often within a year of the Devi’s departure. Sometimes, quitting before she was fired, the Devi possessed a few Adivasis and proclaimed that they could once more eat meat and fish and drink daru and toddy.
As a kind of transition between the Devi movement and the nationalist movement that eventually caught up the Adivasis, a deified form of Gandhi replaced the goddess for a while.56 (The prohibition of alcohol had been high on the list of thingskw that Gandhi wanted the British to grant.57) Some of the Adivasis said that spiders were writing Gandhi’s name in cobwebs; they also saw Gandhi in bottles of kerosene, in the rising sun or the moon (a man—a very particular man—instead of a rabbit), and in wells, where the wheel for the bucket became the spinning wheel (charkha) that Gandhi was to make so famous. Eventually Gandhi himself put a stop to all this mythologizing of his image.58
Gandhi had chosen for the exemplary hero of his paradigm of fasting with love a son who fasts for a father who drinks. But fasting was not the only measure that could be used to control the drinking of a parent or spouse. A far more extreme version of the pressure that women could exert by fasting or withholding sexual access was suttee, a moral control available to women who had no other powers, a desperate but sometimes effective measure. Rajput women in Rajasthan tell this story about their husbands, who, like all Kshatriyas, are expected to drink liquor, but not too much too often:
There was a woman whose husband was fond of liquor and overindulged regularly, causing much strife within the family. One day he was so drunk that he fell off a roof and died. At that time his wife took a vow of suttee. Before immolating herself, she pronounced a curse that from then on no male in the family would be allowed to drink liquor, and since then no one in that household has dared to drink. Even the women gave up drinking alcohol, in order not to tempt their husbands to start again.59
Here it was not a goddess but a human sati whom the women called on to protect their families.
Fast-forward: In the 1990s, in Dobbagunta in Andhra Pradesh, rural women attending a literacy class discovered that they all suffered from their husband’s addiction to arak, the local alcohol. So they launched a campaign to ban it.kx The antiliquor campaign spread across the entire state of Andhra Pradesh. This time too there was no Devi.
CASTE
The Devi movement was as much about caste as about addiction. The British, as we have seen, did little to displace caste and much to enforce it, despite the many voices raised in criticism of Hindu injustices. Eventually both the reform movement and the anti-British initiative passed to a new English-educated Indian elite.60
THE CHAMARS AND THE SATNAMIS
One Pariah caste whose polluted status was directly connected with cows was the Chamars, a caste of leatherworkers who had always borne the stigma of their traditional caste sva-dharma and whose contact with the carcasses of cows excluded them from Hindu temples. But the Chamars in Chattisgarh, in central India, changed their lives in ways that mirror, mutatis mutandis, similar movements throughout India. The Chamars often owned their own land or worked as sharecroppers and farm servants and formed about a sixth of the local population. But in the 1820s, according to Chamar legend, a Chamar farm servant named Ghasidas (c. 1756-1836) threw the images of the gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon onto a rubbish heap and rejected the authority of the Brahmins, the temples, and Hindu puja, as well as the colonial authority. Ghasidas proclaimed belief only in the formless god without qualities (nirguna), called the True Name (satnam), thus affiliating himself with the larger sect of Satnamis that had been founded in the eastern Punjab in 1657. Other low castes joined the Satnampanth (“Path of the True Name”). They all abstained from meat, liquor, tobacco, and certain vegetables, generally red vegetables like tomatoes, chilies, and aubergines (well, a sort of purplish red), and red beans, and they used bullocks instead of cows as their farm animals.61 In this way they simultaneously rejected Brahmins and took on a Brahminical, Sanskritizing, purifying set of values; they became the people they had rebelled against, replicating among themselves the hierarchy that had excluded them.
The Satnamis developed a new mythology, based on their own oral traditions, in which gurus replaced gods as the central figures. These myths were not written down until the late 1920s, and then only by someone who probably sanitized them, appropriating them to the concerns of a largely reformed Brahminical Hinduism. Yet the written forms did not vary significantly from the myths later collected in the oral tradition. We have questioned the pervasiveness of the Brahmin filter for Puranic stories; it may have been equally loosely constructed here, or, on the other hand, the revised written collection may have fed back into the Satnami oral tradition by the time those stories were collected.62
There were other filters to which the Satnami tradition was also exposed. In around 1868 the evangelical missionaries began to convert some of the Satnamis to Christianity, reworking the Satnami oral traditions with Christian teachings and forging connections between Ghasidas and the gurus, on the one hand, and Christ and the missionaries, on the other. And, finally, the most bizarre filter of all: In the 1930s, the Satnamis constructed a new genealogy for their group, with Brahmin ancestors, drawing upon Manu, of all things, but reversing Manu’s arguments, in an attempt to persuade the provincial administration to enter the group as Hindus rather than Harijans in official records, but still to retain the advantages accorded to what were then called the Scheduled Castes (now Dalits). That is, the Satnamis wished to establish their superiority to other castes within the category of Scheduled Castes, once again reproducing the hierarchy. The administration rejected this petition, arguing that all Harijans were Hindus in any case.63
In our day, the advantages of what Hindus call reservation (and we call affirmative action), such as the 1980 Mandal Commission, which reserved nearly half of all government and educational places for the underprivileged castes (whom they called Scheduled Castes), has stood Sanskritization on its head, leading to what we might even call Dalitification. Some Brahmins burned themselves to death in protest over the Mandal recommendations, but the conflict between the so-called Other Backward Castes (OBCs) and (other) Scheduled Castes is sometimes greater than the one between Dalits and Brahmins, as castes not particularly disadvantaged in any way often manage to get themselves reclassified as Scheduled so as to win a share of the new opportunities.64 In Rajasthan, the Gujars (or Gujjars), an Other Backward Caste, clashed with the Meenas (Dalits), because the Gujars wanted a lower, Scheduled status. This was precisely the outcome that Gandhi had feared when he insisted that Harijans decline the chance of being a separate electorate. As Gary Tartakov has put it, “It was evil enough that such racializing degradation was claimed by caste Hindus; it was worse that that is what the members of the Schedule Castes and Tribes accepted themselves to be, if they remained Hindus.”65
The idea that the solution to the problem of the Dalits was precisely not to remain Hindu was one of the strategies adopted by Ambedkar.
UNTOUCHABLES AND DALITS, BUDDHISTS AND AMBEDKAR
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, a Dalit who was one of the group who drafted the Constitution, agreed with Gandhi that Untouchability had to be stopped, but Gandhi thought you could still keep caste, and Ambedkar said you could not. At first, Ambedkar tried to reform Hinduism; he resisted movements that attempted to convert Dalits to Islam or Christianity. Then he reasoned that since the Hindus viewed their tradition as eternal, they regarded basic elements of that tradition, such as class injustice and Untouchability, as eternal too and impossible to eradicate.66 “Gandhiji,” he said, “I have no homeland. How can I call this land my own homeland and this religion my own wherein we are treated worse than cats and dogs, wherein we cannot get water to drink?”67 In the end he converted to Buddhism, translating the Buddhist concept of individual suffering (dukka) into his own awareness of social suffering, discarding a great deal of Buddhism and inserting in its place his own doctrine of social activism. Though he had the good sense to keep a number of Buddhist stories in his platform, one that he did not keep was the story, so basic to the Buddhist tradition, that the future Buddha was confined within a luxurious palace until one day when he had grown up, he went outside and happened to see a sick man, an old man, a dead man, and a renouncer.68 Ambedkar objected to this story because it “does not appeal to reason” that a twenty-nine-year-old man would not have been exposed to death by then.69
Fast-forward: In 1956 five million Dalits, led by Ambedkar, converted to Buddhism. Ambedkar was concerned that they would still be labeled Untouchables if they demanded places reserved for affirmative action, and we have seen that this has continued to be a problem. On the other hand, he insisted that even when they became Buddhists they should retain the rights that he had fought so hard to win for Dalits.70 One of his converts said: “My father became a Buddhist in honor of Ambedkar but could not say so openly. I became a Buddhist too, but only orally, because on the forms you have to write down Scheduled Caste. If you are a Buddhist, you can’t get the scholarship. But I am proud to follow Ambedkar. Being Scheduled Caste causes inferiority in our minds. To be Buddhist, it makes me feel free!”71 It is an irony of history that some Dalits nowadays favor the Aryan invasion theory, but add that they, the Dalits, were the original Adivasis there in India before the Aryans rode in, making the Adivasis older in India and therefore, by the Law of Origins, more honorable than the Aryans.
On November 4, 2001, more than fifty thousand Dalits converted to Buddhism in New Delhi. Some converted only as a protest against the mistreatment of Dalits, but others wholeheartedly became practicing Buddhists. On October 14, 2006, the fiftieth anniversary of the conversion of Ambedkar, Dalits again began to convert in large numbers. As a result, the Hindu Nationalist Party reclassified Buddhism and Jainism as branches of the Hindu religion, to prevent the mass conversions of the Dalits from eroding the political fabric, and several states, including Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, introduced laws requiring anyone wishing to convert to obtain official permission first. In separate rallies, not connected to the conversion ceremonies, thousands of Dalits attempted to burn the new laws.72 In November 2006 the government banned a mass conversion rally in Nagpur that aimed at converting one million Dalits to Buddhism; the authorities were said to be under pressure from Hindu nationalists who called the rally a “Christian conspiracy.” Defying the ban and the barricades, thousands of Dalits from across India gathered at the Ambedkar Bhawan. But Dalits continue to be oppressed, and to protest their oppression, in India.