Navayana Buddhism and the Modern Age 245cities of Bombay and Nagpur, which provided employment outlets
for peasants, artisans and Dalits. This new working class was
mainly from Kunbi-Maratha and related communities, but by the
20th century, Dalits were about 20 per cent of the textile work-
force in Bombay and 40 per cent of that in Nagpur.
Among these Dalits, or untouchables, the Mahars were the
largest community. ‘Where there’s a village, there’s a Maharwada’
(Mahar quarters) was a traditional Marathi saying. Like most large
untouchable jatis, the Mahars provided field labour, carried out
some ‘polluting’ tasks such as removing dead cattle (though they
were not themselves leather workers) and were low-level village
servants, at the beck and call of village leaders and higher level
officials. For this they received the harvest from a portion of land
known as the ‘Mahar watan’. Thus they were not totally landless,
and especially in the eastern part of the state, they sometimes
had relatively large holdings. There were two ‘malguzar’ (landlord)
Mahar families in the Nagpur area, and many who called them-
selves ‘patils’ or headmen. The Mahars also had some ancient
traditions as ‘sons of the soil’, and their traditional duties included
deciding disputes about boundaries of farmers’ fields. During
the British period, they provided army recruits for some time, in the
famous ‘Mahar battalion’, and they made up, as already noted, a
good proportion of the textile workers.
The relatively equalitarian situation of the main peasant castes as
well as the assertiveness of Dalit communities like the Mahars
provided a material base for a relatively democratic social tradition
from the 19th century onwards. While Phule’s radicalism had been
too strong for many of his associates, his Satyashodhak tradition
and fierce, polemical writings had left an unforgettable heritage.
By the 20th century an expanded non-Brahman movement had
emerged, with patronage from the Maharajah of Kolhapur, a
descendent of the famous 17th century Maratha ruler Shivaji, who
had been alienated by Brahmanical declarations that since his
family was ‘Shudra’ he had no rights to Vedic rituals. With his
support the non-Brahman movement grew in strength in the 1920s,
posing a challenge to elite nationalism and orthodox tradition,
asserting its strength politically in the legislative council. It has
both a more conservative wing, exemplified in the many caste asso-
ciations that developed at the time, and a radical wing, embodied
in the revived Satyashodhak Samaj (Omvedt 1976: 98–164).244 Buddhism in India
Table conferences and again in 1936 are a historic marker in the
challenge to Brahmanism.
Ambedkar confronted not only Gandhi and the reformist and
orthodox Hindus but also Indian Marxism. Ambedkar himself was
a radical, influenced by Marxism and calling himself for some time
a ‘state socialist’. In the tumultuous decade of the 1930s he allied
with Communists on issues of workers and peasants’ struggles. Where
he broke with the Marxists was over issues of caste and religion.
These debates, in the 1940s and 1950s, mark a second historic
challenge to a renewed Brahmanism in India.
Ambedkar’s movement towards Buddhism began in 1908, when
he first received a book on the Buddha’s life. He followed it with
reading on Indian tradition and whatever Buddhist texts he could
get access to, with discussions, with visits to the ancient sites of
Buddhist caves in Maharashtra. It reached a climax in 1935 when
Ambedkar announced, ‘Although I have been born a Hindu, I will
not die a Hindu.’ And it culminated in October 1956 in the city of
Nagpur in central India when he and 400,000 followers took the
‘three refuges’ of traditional Buddhism and an additional 22 vows.
This was a major turning point for Dalits and for the religious–
cultural identity of India.
Mahars and Maharashtra
Ambedkar was born a Mahar, a particularly vigorous untouchable
community of the state of Maharashtra in western India. He was a
gigantic, unique historical figure, one inclined to make us believe
that at least to some degree ‘great men’ do have a role in history.
Yet it is impossible to imagine his leadership without the background
of the specific geographical characteristics and social-historical
traditions of Maharashtra.
First, geographically, this area, with its rich black lava soil but
hilly and dry for the most part, had few of the ‘river valley’ type
wet areas which fostered the most rigid caste hierarchies; only
the coastal areas fitted this description. Its peasantry was relatively
solidary; the largest single caste, the Kunbi-Marathas, comprised
nearly one-third of the total Marathi-speaking population, with
hierarchically (but ambiguously) ranked clans instead of subcastes.
Colonial rule here gave birth to a thriving textile industry in the