Navayana Buddhism and the Modern Age 247roads, visit village temples, live in the main section of the village
itself; and to take water from village wells or the supposedly public
municipal water reservoirs. Agitation on these issue had already
begun, with Phule’s act of throwing open his own private well to
untouchables in the 19th century serving as a model, and in 1923
one of the non-Brahman members of the state legislature sponsored
a bill giving untouchables legal right to such public facilities.
Ambedkar decided to challenge the exclusion from public water in
the small town of Mahad in the Konkan, where he had some caste
Hindu support. Initially a conference was organised there, and when
people arose, nearly spontaneously (though the activists around
Ambedkar had discussed the idea), and went down to drink water
from the reservoir, near rioting ensued, and caste Hindus acted
rapidly to ‘purify’ the tank. Ambedkar then went back to Bombay,
vowing to return, used the incident to spark off an even larger move-
ment and founded a new weekly, Bahishkrut Bharat. Gandhi was
just making his entry into Indian politics; the new untouchable
movement sought to extend ‘satyagraha’ into the social sphere, and
installed Gandhi’s photo on their Mahad pavilion. In the end, after
an injunction, the untouchables gave up their attempt to take water,
but instead signified their rejection of Brahmanic tradition by pub-
licly burning the Manusmriti. With this, a struggle for the human
physical need of water and a citizen’s right of access to public space
was transformed into a challenge to Brahmanic tradition. The day
was December 26, 1927; and the struggle became celebrated as the
‘Untouchable Liberation Day’ from that time on.
Buddhism, however, was apparently not seen as an alternative at
this time. Ambedkar is reported to have visited ancient Buddhist
caves in the Mahad area (Sangarakshata 1986: 5–8). But the
debates that began to take place over the rejection of Hinduism in
Bahiskhrut Bharatat the time focused on Islam and Christianity. A
minor storm was raised when a group in Jalgaon vowed that ‘a
thousand Mahars’ would convert to Islam or Christianity if
untouchability was not removed by July 1, 1929. Twelve of them
eventually did accept Islam. Ambedkar was sympathetic. As he
wrote in one of his editorials,No particular effect will be felt on the bullying of the so-called upper
castes by becoming Buddhist or Arya Samajist, so we see no meaning
in following this path. To successfully confront the domination ofThe Emergence of Ambedkar
It was in this low-caste but vigorous community of Mahars that
Babasaheb Ambedkar was born in 1891.^1 His father, who had
served in the British army, had minimal education in Marathi and
English, and saw to it that his obviously brilliant son was also edu-
cated. When the boy passed his matriculation examination in 1908,
he received a copy of Krishna Arjunrao Keluskar’s Marathi book
on the life of the Buddha. Then he was awarded a fellowship from
the Maharaja of Baroda, another reformist non-Brahman ruler, to
study in the US from 1913 to 1917. Here he completed a Ph.D. in
Economics and Politics at the University of Columbia, perhaps the
most famous Indian to study at this university. Returning to India,
he went first to the state of Baroda to work as a government
employee in return for his scholarship—but rejected this after
experiences of treatment as an untouchable in the offices and after
difficulty in finding a place to live. Instead, he settled in Bombay,
teaching in Elphinstone College and, in the 1920s, publishing two
major books on economics, one on provincial finances in India, the
other on the history of British policies regarding Indian currency.
At a time when all of Indian society was convulsed with economic
and political turmoil, political involvement was almost an
inevitability for this brilliant and articulate untouchable. In 1920
Ambedkar was introduced to the movement, notably under the
sponsorship of Shahu Maharaj of Kolhapur. This itself can be said
to have been a conscious choice of the young man, and indeed he
never ceased to identity himself with the non-Brahman movement
and even called himself a ‘Satyashodhak’, even though he was crit-
ical of many of its tendencies. He was even more critical of
reformist nationalists, and like almost all Dalit and non-Brahman
leaders, he severely attacked ‘swadeshi’ nationalism. Gradually he
began to build a group of activists and supporters, which included
both Mahars and caste Hindus, and published a few editions of his
first journal, Mooknayakin the 1920s.
In 1927 a spectacular first struggle took place. The issue was that
of access to water. Untouchables had, of course, traditionally been
denied rights to almost any public space, forbidden to use village
246 Buddhism in India
(^1) This section draws primarily on the work of Eleanor Zelliot and myself.