It was in 1918 that Vithalbhai Patel – the elder brother of the more famous Vallabhbhai Patel, Rai and Gandhi’s colleague in the Indian National Congress – introduced a bill in the Imperial Legislative Council taking on endogamy, a principle sacrosanct to the age-old caste system. The Hindu Marriages Validity Bill polarised Hindus on whether inter-caste marriage was desirable and whether the time was ripe for such a reform. The two most prominent Congress leaders in the council, Madan Mohan Malaviya and Surendranath Banerjea, spoke out against the bill despite the strong case made by Patel.
Outside the council, Gandhi and Rai were at odds with each other on Vithalbhai Patel’s bill. Writing from New York in the course of his international campaign for India’s political emancipation, Rai said, “It will be a great blow to our prestige and good name abroad if this extremely small measure of reform based on actual legal necessity is defeated on foolish sentimental grounds.”
Gandhi’s reaction was unsympathetic to the legal necessity established by Patel for getting rid of restrictions on inter-caste marriage. He threw a loaded question at Patel: “Considering all this commotion among the Hindus, do you still think that your Bill will be useful to the country?”
The only concession Gandhi was willing to make on inter-caste marriages at that stage was to let them take place without transgressing varna – the overarching categories, sanctified in Hindu scripture, that define the caste hierarchy. While saying he had “no objection” to marriages between castes of the same varna, Gandhi stressed that “on no account should the existing four-fold division be broken through.”
Gandhi’s unabashed espousal of varna strictures, despite their connotations of caste-based segregation, reflected the sociopolitical context of the era, in which it took over 30 years of repeated effort for inter-caste marriage – something that Rai had described as an “extremely small measure of reform” – to finally be legalised in India. The controversy around the reform also underscored the irony of someone identified as a “Hindu nationalist” – namely, Rai – taking a more progressive position on inter-caste marriage than Gandhi, the exemplar of secular “Indian nationalism”.
A biography of Lajpat Rai – often remembered as Lala Lajpat Rai, the suffix a term of respect for men of the mercantile castes – should shed light on the curious difference between his reaction and that of Gandhi to the initiative to do away with the rigid custom of caste. But Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav’s elegantly written and deeply researched Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood makes no reference to what was a watershed moment in India’s checkered history of Hindu consolidation.
The omission of the Patel Bill controversy is despite the fact that Bhargav, an intellectual historian of modern Southasia, has dwelt at length on how caste is central to Hinduism. She has also written extensively on Rai’s association from his early years with the Arya Samaj, the reformist and revivalist sect that was instrumental in persuading Patel to initiate the battle to legalise inter-caste marriage.
Bhargav’s book has confirmed, however unwittingly, that in grappling with caste his Arya Samaj background gave Rai a head start over Gandhi, who was saddled with a more orthodox Vaishnavite upbringing. Linking this inference to the evidence detailed in my book Caste Pride: Battles for Equality in Hindu India (2023), it is clear that it was only well after Rai’s death in 1928 that Gandhi gradually began to take radical positions on caste. This shift came from 1932 onwards, in the aftermath of the Poona Pact.
Given the proclivity of the Hindu Right in recent years to appropriate Rai as an ideological ancestor of Hindutva, Bhargav takes pains to expose the gulf between him and Hindutva’s founding father, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar – even when the two were, at different times, part of the same Brahminical Hindu-nationalist organisation, the Hindu Mahasabha. She points out Rai’s conciliatory approach, a contrast to the typical Hindu Right stance, at two fraught junctures: the 1916 pact between the Congress and the Muslim League on separate electorates for India’s Muslims, and the Khilafat movement of a few years later for the restoration of an Islamic caliph. “His ability to see the Muslim nation existing robustly alongside the Hindu nation was vastly different from Savarkar’s demand that to become part of the Hindu nation, Indian Muslims and Christians must abandon all marks of their religion and culture and assimilate into ‘Hindu culture’. Rai’s Hindu nationalism lacked Savarkarite Hindutva’s desire for Hindu cultural supremacy and its aversion to religio-cultural diversity.”
The main focus of Bhargav’s book, as evident from its title, is Rai’s nationalism. Even so, and though overlooking Patel’s bill, Bhargav provides brilliant insight on Rai’s ideological evolution on caste. To begin with, his Arya Samaj grounding allowed “caste hierarchy to be explicitly acknowledged as a problem, leading him to espouse radical caste reform.” This fits together with his enthusiasm for the inter-caste marriage bill. But as Rai’s conception of Hindu nationalism changed with the times, “the felt urgency of defending this Hindu majority from the perceived threat of the Muslim community could make him abandon caste radicalism and adopt a more conciliatory attitude towards ‘orthodox’ Sanatanist Hindus (i.e., Hindus claiming to defend sanatan dharm or the eternal, timeless Hindu religion).”
From this peculiar transformation in Rai’s outlook on caste, Bhargav makes a larger point about the surprising ways in which India’s two dominant strands of nationalism played out with regard to the caste question. “Lajpat Rai’s intellectual trajectory on caste reveals that ‘Hindu nationalism’ can variously involve conservative or radical attitudes to caste, and that ‘secular Indian nationalism’ can entail a more conservative stance towards caste as compared with ‘Hindu nationalist’ positions.”
The idea that a secular nationalist could be more conservative than a Hindu nationalist when it came to caste is a little-studied paradox. Having pointed to this complexity, Bhargav could well have added that no less a figure than Gandhi himself was an example of it, for a good part of his public life.
IN 1909, marking an inflexion point in the history of India, the British colonial government enacted separate electorates for Muslims. This was done at the insistence of the Muslim League, with its fears of political domination by the Hindu majority, but for the British it was a convenient tactic in their divide-and-rule approach. The change was accompanied by a “weightage” for Muslims in terms of representation, giving them a proportion of electoral seats higher than their population share, so as a corrective for the “unfairly inflated” Hindu population that included the Depressed Classes – the prevailing umbrella term for the marginalised communities that are now called Dalits and Adivasis.
These drastic steps added “an urgency to Lajpat Rai’s efforts”, as Bhargav says, to achieve not only “Hindu national unity” but also “Hindu unity via the route of caste.” This was apparently because the Muslim League’s argument for weightage had been accompanied by references to the Hindu caste system. In a 1909 article on the Depressed Classes, Rai argued that neglecting these groups was “politically unsound” as it had enabled Muslims to push for their exclusion from the category of Hindus.
In contrast, Gandhi made no reference whatsoever to caste, much less its egregious manifestation as untouchability, in the whole of a book he published that same year, titled Hind Swaraj. To be fair, Gandhi wrote this polemic against British rule in India and paean to “traditional” Indian life long before he returned to India from his two-decade South African stint. But the omission, if not erasure, of caste in his much-touted Hind Swaraj gives a sense of how much his perspective had already been shaped by Brahminism and Hindu orthodoxy when he plunged into India’s freedom struggle.
The year of Gandhi’s return to India, in 1915, was also when Rai gave further evidence of the advantage of imbibing the heterodox values of the Arya Samaj. He did so in his magnum opus, The Arya Samaj: An Account of its Origins, Doctrines and Activities. As Bhargav put it,
Lajpat Rai now more explicitly attacked ‘the unquestioned authority of the mere Brahmin by birth’. He argued that a child born to Brahmin parents had no inherent social superiority nor the right to preach religion. A man’s position as Brahmin was determined not by birth but by his knowledge of the Vedas. And since everyone had the right to read and interpret the Vedas directly for themselves, everyone had an ‘equal right to become Brahmins’.
Given the disdain he had expressed for those claiming to be Brahmins just by the accident of birth, it was no surprise that three years later Rai welcomed Patel’s bill on inter-caste marriage so unreservedly. Equally, it was no surprise that Gandhi responded to the same bill in such an instrumental manner, prioritising political freedom over social reform. Hindu orthodoxy cast a shadow for several more years over whatever measures he undertook to address the caste inequities that stared him in the face.
Take the resolution on caste adopted by the Indian National Congress at its 1920 Nagpur session, where Gandhi, riding on his nascent non-cooperation movement, emerged as its unchallenged leader. In what raised hopes of India’s political mainstream finally confronting caste, the session’s Gandhi-inspired resolution called upon “the leading Hindus to settle all disputes between Brahmins and non-Brahmins … and to make a special effort to rid Hinduism of the reproach of untouchability.”
The provocation for this were colonial reforms the previous year that allowed non-Brahmins a greater say in law-making and governance, and included a special provision to nominate Dalits to legislatures. Now, having boycotted the 1920 elections for the Imperial Legislative Council and provincial councils in keeping with its policy of non-cooperation, the Congress watched the legislative rise of non-Brahmin and Dalit forces, most notably in the form of the Justice Party in the Madras Presidency. The party came up with its stirring Nagpur resolution within days of this.
But the Congress’s egalitarian rhetoric did not make any appreciable difference to its behaviour, especially in terms of combating untouchability. For the next decade or so, whether out of conviction or expediency, Gandhi evaded the sensitive issue of allowing Dalits entry into temples as he remained an avowed votary of varna.Though the Gandhi-supported Vaikom agitation in Kerala in 1924-1925 is often mistaken to have been for temple entry, it was only for letting members of oppressed castes access the roads leading to the temple.
Meanwhile, the increasing assertion of the subaltern castes drove Rai to engage deeply with the Hindu Mahasabha despite its sectarian outlook. He saw caste politics as, in Bhargav’s words, “the product of British and Muslim machinations to politically fracture the Hindu community.” Worse, he insinuated that the “supposed representatives of the depressed classes” – B R Ambedkar and M C Rajah – were at worst “hired agents” of either the British or the Muslim League, or at best “naively playing into the hands” of the British policy of divide and rule and Muslim attempts to politically divide Hindus to secure an advantage for themselves.
In his address to the Hindu Mahasabha in Bombay in 1925, Rai’s prescription for mitigating caste tensions put beyond doubt his conversion to conservative ideology. Far from advocating equality across the Hindu community, he sought to maintain the preeminence of the dominant “twice-born” castes by suggesting that only those non-Brahmins not engaged in menial or “Shudra” occupations should be admitted to the twice-born fold. Refusing to see the politics of the oppressed castes as “a legitimate vehicle of emancipation”, Rai opposed such politics because, to quote Bhargav, “it thwarted attempts to consolidate a politics of the majority Hindu community.”
Though Gandhi had no truck with such Hindu majoritarianism, he and Rai both betrayed conservative positions on caste in their own ways during this period. They also happened to be on the same side in opposing the all-white Simon Commission, set up to devise the next generation of constitutional reforms for British India. It was while leading a demonstration against the Simon Commission in 1928 that Rai suffered the injuries at the hands of the police that resulted in his death about a fortnight later. His death famously provoked Bhagat Singh to kill a British police officer as vengeance, leading to the anti-colonial revolutionary’s hanging.
In 1931, Gandhi clashed with Ambedkar in London at the Second Round Table Conference, a sequel to the Simon Commission, over the question of whether Dalits, like Muslims and Sikhs, should have separate electorates. This set the stage for the British government’s conferment of such a right on Dalits in 1932. Just about a month later, Gandhi went on a fast unto death, forcing Ambedkar to give up that hard-fought right of Dalits as part of what came to be known as the Poona Pact. It was then, as a reciprocal gesture, that Gandhi opened up to the radical idea of temple entry for Dalits. And even so, it was not under a rights-based approach that would apply across the board. All that Gandhi espoused was a “local option” formula, designed to be applied on a case-by-case basis: only such temples were to be thrown open to Dalits where the local devotees had expressed their consent through a referendum.
It was only around the time of India’s independence in 1947 that laws adopting a rights-based approach to temple entry were passed in different states. As for inter-caste marriage, it was only about a year after Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 – at the hands of a Hindu Mahasabha member – that the law first proposed by Vithalbhai Patel was finally enacted.
If the Patel Bill had been opposed vehemently by the dominant section of the Congress in 1918, the same law under the same name was passed unanimously in 1949 by members of the same party. One obvious reason for this drastic change in attitude was that, after 1947, the option of scapegoating the colonial rulers for the persistence of India’s own social evils was not available any longer. Another major factor was the courage displayed by Gandhi towards the end of his life, more than ever before, in defying caste prejudices.
Besides shedding his inhibitions about letting Dalits enter all temples irrespective of the feelings of the dominant castes, Gandhi turned so radical on inter-caste marriage that he announced that he would attend only those weddings where the bride was from the upper end of the caste hierarchy while the groom was from the lower end. So the civilisational breakthrough manifested by the Hindu Marriages Validity Act 1949 came as a vindication of the Gandhi on display in the final phase of his life.
Since Gandhi outlived Rai by two decades, he had more opportunities to review his early views on caste, including the conciliatory approach he had displayed to Brahminism in the 1920s. Judging purely by the regressive position that Rai had taken on caste towards the end of his life, it is moot whether he would have approved of the 1949 enactment of the very bill he had supported in 1918 during that progressive phase of his thinking. After all, once he got more deeply involved with the Hindu Mahasabha, his priority had shifted to preserving the sanctity of the twice-born castes. It is anybody’s guess whether Rai would have evolved enough from there to be open to the taboo that Gandhi embraced in his advanced years: the Pratiloma marriage between a Brahmin woman and a Dalit man.
THE QUESTION THAT emerges is how did a leftwing revolutionary like Bhagat Singh imperil his life to avenge the death of Rai? Bhargav offers an interesting explanation for the motivation of the martyr, who was 21 years old when he killed policeman John Saunders.
It goes back to 1907, the year that Bhagat Singh was born. For that was also the year in which his uncle Ajit Singh was deported to Burma along with Rai, both for their anti-colonial activities. “Although a Jat Sikh, Bhagat’s upbringing had been Arya Samajist, with the Samaj laying the ground for his radicalism. The knowledge of Rai’s association and contribution to the Samaj must have formed part of his childhood.” Besides, he went on to study at the anti-colonial National College, founded by Rai. Another formative influence on Bhagat Singh was Rai’s book collection in the college library.
“Despite these connections, however, by the mid-1920s, Bhagat had come to vehemently disagree with Lajpat Rai’s Hindu Mahasabha politics.” Bhargav concludes: “More than personal indebtedness or ideological convergence, it was Lajpat Rai’s lifelong service to anti-colonial nationalism, and his stature as a symbol of this anti-colonial nationalism, that had prompted Bhagat Singh to avenge his death.”
She might well have added that Bhagat Singh’s reverence for Rai could also have had nothing to do with his conversion from a radical to a conservative on caste.
source : himalmag