How Bhima Koregaon Became a Trope for Dalit Pride and Assertion

arun Posted On June 15, 2024

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Author Ajaz Ashraf

Below is an excerpt from the recent book of Ajaz Ashraf titled Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste. Publisher: AuthorsUpFront.

The story you are about to read does not begin with the beginning. It does not because it is difficult to identify precisely where and when the story began. The beginning is buried deep inside events that occurred centuries ago, recorded or remembered and passed down orally over generations, in what is now the state of Maharashtra in western India. As emperors came and went, empires fell and dynasties withered away, memory was continuously recast, holding out new meanings for people. The very act of remembering became a method of rewriting memory, designed to both inspire and horrify, a tool for legitimising the present or altering the future. It is this memory that both the educated and the unlettered recognise as history, regardless of whether it is documented and verified for its historicity, a task of historians.

The people’s history, or rather histories, were united by their search for answers to questions familiar to us, too. Who rules? Who frames laws? Who commands high social status? Who must toil and serve the elite? Who sits at the top of the social ladder – and who flounders at its lower rungs? Are those at the bottom doomed to languish there in perpetuity? Who is the exploiter and who the exploited? How does social change take place?

These questions were not couched in lucid ideological terms in centuries past, as is the case today. Yet, in India, these questions plumbed and probed the caste system, its rigid rules and its resistance to social change, which occurred, if at all, incrementally, at an infinitesimal pace. Quests for change were met with extreme violence, the reason why Buddhism perished in the land of its birth. Buddhism did not recognise caste, a construction of Brahminical Hinduism, and radically, for its times, offered equality to its followers. It is only a partial truth that claims that the challenge Buddhism represented was blunted through philosophical debate and co-option into Brahminical Hinduism. The story of the disappearance of Buddhism from India also involved the hounding and killing of Buddhists and the burning down or appropriation of their stupas and monasteries. The backlash compelled Buddhist monks to leave India with their sacred textsThe national media coverage of the violence at Bhima Koregaon enhanced the historical significance of the place. Until 2018, Bhima Koregaon was not embedded in the popular consciousness outside Maharashtra.

The story you are going to read is, in its essence, a clash between two worldviews over the principles of organising society.

This is the story of the outbreak of violence on January 1, 2018, at Bhima Koregaon village, around thirty kilometres from Pune, where thousands upon thousands of Dalits – the erstwhile Untouchables – had marched to pay homage at the Vijay Stambh or Victory Pillar. It was here, on January 1, 1818, that less than 900 soldiers of the 2nd battalion 1st regiment of the Bombay Native Infantry, under the command of Captain F.F. Staunton, vanquished a 25,000-strong army of Peshwa Baji Rao II, already a fugitive by then, crushing his hope of retaining his kingdom and sovereigntyDuff, James Grant, A History of The Mahrattas, Vol. III, Longan, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, London, 1826, pp 432-433. The figures of troops on both sides vary across different sources. Philip Constable, in his paper, The Marginalization of a Dalit Martial Race in Late Nineteenth – and Early – Twentieth Century Western India, estimated that at least half of the British troops were Mahars, twenty-two of whom died in what is now remembered as the Battle of Bhima Koregaon.

The significance of the battle was underscored with the British laying the foundation stone, on March 26, 1821, for an obelisk, sixty-five feet high, mounted on a stone platform about thirty-two square feet, on the spot from where the first shot in the Battle of Bhima Koregaon was said to have been fired. The names of those who died in the battle are etched on the monument. The defeated Peshwa, a hereditary institution, was a Chitpavan Brahmin by caste. The Mahars were the Untouchables. They represented the two poles of the caste hierarchy. As it was then, so it is now.

The history of the 1818 battle was recovered and reimagined in the fight for equality a century or so later. It became a trope for the fighting prowess of the Dalits, and the possibility that they could turn on its head the social order of which they were decidedly among the exploited. Every January 1, they flock to the Bhima Koregaon Victory Pillar to celebrate their triumph, drawing inspiration from the past to renew their quest to flatten the social hierarchy existing today. Yet it would be a stretch to claim that the Dalits fought fiercely and valiantly because they wished to avenge the humiliation that they endured under the Peshwas. They were the recruits of the British Indian Army that comprised not just them but also soldiers from other social groups. The aim of the British was not to liberate the Mahars but to bring as much of India under their control as possible. It is certainly a myth to frame the Battle of Bhima Koregaon as the victory of Mahars, a myth created most notably by Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, popularly known as Babasaheb Ambedkar, to inspire the Dalits to fight Brahminism.

Yet a caveat must be added: it is easy to conceive why the Dalits would not have been dismayed, if not delighted, at the end of the Peshwa rule even in the 19th century, as I show in the section ‘Caste History in Verse’ of Chapter 2. Nevertheless, it is possible to imagine why the Battle of Bhima Koregaon became a trope for Dalit pride and assertion. Stories about the valour of individual Mahars abound, an account of which you will read later in the book. But 1818 was arguably the first time that they were officially recognised as a group and feted for their fighting prowess. It had all the elements of being turned into a myth, in the same way, the history of Maharana Rana Pratap’s guerrilla war against the Mughals has become one. Myths serve as a psychological salve for overcoming the traumatic past for the purpose of negotiating the present. It is for this reason that some myths acquire sanctity, as is the case regarding the myth of the Mahars winning the Battle of Bhima Koregaon.

The 1818 battle as the trope of Dalit pride and assertion came under attack 200 years after Staunton’s soldiers defeated the Peshwa’s army, through yet another battle waged in and around Bhima Koregaon on January 1, 2018. This modern battle was fought not with cannons and cavalry but with stones, rods and lathis, and vituperative taunts and insulting slogans. Vehicles were smashed and burnt, and business establishments set on fire. On the one side, in the modern reprise of the Battle of Bhima Koregaon, were the Dalits, largely Ambedkarites, or those who believe in the ideology of Ambedkar. On the other side were the Marathas, allegedly egged on by Brahmin leaders, such as Sambhaji Bhide and Milind Ekbote. With a large segment of Brahmins and Marathas aligned together, the 2018 battle was subliminally perceived – by both the elite and the subaltern – as a conflict between the Brahminical and Ambedkarite worldviews. The first justifies the caste hierarchy; the second seeks to flatten it.

The caste conflict underpinning the violence at Bhima Koregaon was arguably one of the reasons why the media headlined it, for, as far as the rioting goes, the casualties were minor, in comparison to many caste and religious conflagrations that have occurred since India’s Independence. In the Bhima Koregaon violence, one person died, forty-eight were injured and properties worth Rs 9 crore were devastated.

The national media coverage of the violence at Bhima Koregaon enhanced the historical significance of the place. Until 2018, Bhima Koregaon was not embedded in the popular consciousness outside Maharashtra. But, even that state awareness about the events of 1818 was largely confined to the Dalit community, brought out vividly in a 2011 survey in Pune, which was once the capital of the Peshwas and is today a thriving hub of information technology. It was conducted among 130 members of “high-caste, neo-rich people,” all of whom said they had not heard of the Bhima Koregaon memorial. They also expressed hostility to the policy of reserving government jobs and seats in educational institutes for the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes, and Other Backward Classes (OBCs).

The media’s interest in Bhima Koregaon and the subsequent police investigations into the violence spotlighted the Elgar Parishad, a cultural programme held on December 31, 2017, as the cause of the rioting. Organised by two retired Justices, P.B. Sawant and B.G. Kolse Patil, at the Shaniwarwada Fort, Pune, once the seat of the Peshwas, the Elgar Parishad saw the participation of 260 civil society groups. The Elgar Parishad was styled as a challenge to the emerging new Peshwai, or the Rule of Inequality ushered in by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governments, both at the Centre and in Maharashtra. The organisers of the Elgar Parishad sought to underscore to visitors, expected to be in Pune on their way to Bhima Koregaon, the necessity of opposing Brahminical Hinduism. On December 31, speeches were made, songs sung, and a play performed. These performances mocked Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and blamed them for the ostensible revival of Brahminical Hinduism. Since the cultural programme was a no-holds-barred criticism of Brahminical Hinduism, it was perceived by many, including the Pune police, as an attack on the Brahmin community.

A reading of the songs, speeches and the play during the Elgar Parishad would show that these were critical of Brahminical Hinduism, not Brahmins, for extolling and justifying the Hindu caste hierarchy. Brahminical Hinduism is a social philosophy. All those who subscribe to the caste-based social stratification, regardless of their social background, are considered votaries of Brahminical Hinduism. Every member of the upper castes does not automatically become a follower of Brahminical Hinduism. For instance, both the late Sawant and Kolse Patil are Maratha by caste! And Marathas consider themselves Kshatriya. It is also true that several Maratha organisations, such as the Maratha Seva Sangh (MSS), are as committed to fighting Brahminical Hinduism as any.