The belated acceptance of Hindi Dalit literature has come after a long period of gatekeeping. It was in the tumultuous decade of the 1990s, marked by the ‘Mandal versus kamandal’ schism, that Dalit literature in Hindi witnessed efflorescence. Therefore, the histories of Dalit Hindi literature invariably begin with this decade, ignoring the extremely varied and radical literary corpus of three heterodox intellectuals from the 1920s and 1930s. Most literary historiographers have also commented on the lack of a historical lineage in Dalit Hindi literature as opposed to literatures in other languages in India. It is this critical consensus that Tapan Basu sets out to contest in this book under review.
Basu avers that while both Phule’s non-Brahmin movement and the Ambedkarite movement have received ample critical attention, the subaltern counter-public emerging in the United Provinces in the early decades of the twentieth century has remained insufficiently theorized. The emergence of Dalit political consciousness in the Hindi belt in the first three decades of the twentieth century has received scant attention as compared to its rise in southern and western India. The spread of education amongst Dalits in the United Provinces, the availability of the print medium and migration to town plus other avenues opened up by colonial modernity—all of these facilitated the growth of an oppositional culture. Basu traces the emergence of the Adi-Hindu movement in the United Provinces under the leadership of Swami Acchutanand, a Chamar and his close associate, Chandrika Prasad Jigyasu, a Sudra by birth. Incidentally, both owned printing presses of their own, in Kanpur and Lucknow respectively, and these presses were instrumental in publishing their books. Despite the availability of several books on the Adi-Hindu movement, none of them engages either with its corpus of literary production or with the writings of Swami Acchutanand in detail.
In the second chapter, Basu offers a condensed account of the non-Brahmin movements launched by Phule and Periyar as antecedents to the Adi-Hindu Movement, which, like its contemporaneous avatars in the Southern regions, inherited Phule’s theory of Aryan invasion and the conquest of indigenous peoples. He outlines the complex interplay of several socio-political factors which provided a fertile ground for the emergence of anti-caste ideologues. Missionary schools and educational provisions within the British army provided educational opportunities for ‘lower’ castes, enabling the emergence of a subaltern consciousness among them, which could now be articulated through print. What distinguished the Adi-Hindu movement from its regional contemporaneous variants such as Adi-Dravida, Adi-Dharm, and Adi-Andhra was the all-India character of the former, which is evident from the conferences organized by its founders all over India. Highlighting significant differences between the Adi-Hindu movement and the Ambedkarite movement, Basu insightfully points out a significant convergence between them—both wanted to annihilate the caste system and not merely reform the Hindu social order.
Excavating the varied literary production of Acchutanand from oblivion, Basu simultaneously contextualizes it in Acchutanand’s ideological forays into Arya Samaj, his disillusionment with it, and his negotiations (like Ambedkar) with the colonial authorities to apprise them of the plight of the untouchable castes in India. As the undisputed leader of the Adi-Hindu movement, he presented a charter of seventeen forcefully articulated demands to the Prince of Wales visiting India in 1922.
Again, he adopted a critical stand vis-à-vis dominant nationalism as it seemed to bypass/occlude issues of the Depressed Classes, exactly as Ambedkar had done. Besides the short pieces of prose and verse written by him, his speeches constituted a significant part of his literary corpus. Analysing his speeches, Basu writes that Acchutanand donned the mantle of an ‘imaginative historian’ who evoked the sovereignty and glory of the pre-Aryan Adi-Hindus, devastated by the Aryan invasion.
Acchutanand is credited with editing three journals in Hindi (all published by his own printing press), one of which, Pracheen Hindu, is supposed to be the first journal produced by an intellectual of the downtrodden classes. Basu traces his journalistic career as running parallel to that of Ambedkar in the 1920s. His first book of verse, Adi Kavya, contained poems, which, like his speeches, aimed to rouse the ‘lower’ castes from their passivity, so that they could organize themselves politically on the basis of a shared identity. Shunning the narrative of victimhood, these poems and speeches exhorted the Dalits to celebrate their glorious heritage. Basu distills the essence of his ‘autochthonous radicalism’, for which Acchutanand, eschewing Sanskrit (though he had mastered it by the age of 14), chose vernacular Hindi, a people’s language, for self-expression. Of the numerous unfinished plays, conceptualized by Acchutanand and documented by Jigyasu in his authoritative biography of the former, only two, namely Ram Rajya Nyaya, and Mayanand Balidaan, written in the 1920s, have survived. In the plays too, he propagated the Adi-Hindu ideology and interrogated the tenets of Brahminical Hinduism. He consciously distanced himself from much of contemporary folk theatre because of its espousal of a Brahminical worldview. Providing a close reading of the two plays, Basu investigates the probable reasons for the neglect of his literary corpus by the Hindi literary establishment.
The next chapter is devoted to an examination of the literary oeuvre of Chandrika Prasad Jigyasu, Acchutanand’s ‘lieutenant’. Both envisioned, very much in the mould of Phule, an alliance of the sudras-atisudras to challenge the hegemony of the dominant castes. Like his mentor, initially drawn to the Arya Samaj and the mainstream nationalist movement, Jigyasu’s ideological orientation changed drastically after coming into contact with Swami Acchutanand and Bhikshu Bodhanand. Basu sympathetically traces the trajectory of Jigyasu: from having a staunch nationalist outlook (writing nationalist pamphlets) to being sceptical about it and becoming a leader of the Depressed Classes with a Bahujan consciousness. This is evident in how his poetic paeans to Nehru and Gandhi were later followed by satirical poems on these very revered leaders along with a poetic eulogy to Ambedkar. His own printing press, Bahujan Kalyan Prakashan in Lucknow, became the means of publishing pamphlets and books for the lower castes. Encouraged by Acchutanand, Jigyasu, drawing upon ethnological, textual and archaeological sources, authored Bharat Ke Adi-Nivasiyon ki Sabhyata, which was a distillation of the highly developed civilization of the indigenous people of India prior to the Aryan invasion. Interestingly, like Phule, Jigyasu was bold enough to offer a radical reinterpretation of Hindu mythology by replacing the revered Hindu deities with figures such as Bali and Hiranyakashipu. Basu offers a close reading of Jigyasu’s narratives about exemplary figures such as the Buddha, Sant Ravidas, Bodhanand, Acchutanand and Ambedkar. Besides publishing Ambedkar’s seminal works in Hindi, Jigyasu enjoys the distinction of having produced the first biography of Ambedkar in Hindi. He was also the first to write about the much-talked about ideological conflict between Gandhi and Ambedkar. Basu discusses Jigyasu’s discursive essays, one of them on the lives of women, in which he offered an indictment of Hindu patriarchy.
The penultimate chapter of this scholarly book delves into the life and works of Bhikshu Bodhanand, who is described by Basu as a bridge between Acchutanand and Jigyasu. Born in a Brahmin family and well versed in Hindu theology, he eventually grew disillusioned, reminiscent of Pandita Ramabai, from Hinduism because of the pivotal importance of the caste system in it. After converting to Buddhism, he made sustained efforts to disseminate Buddhist philosophy. Having renounced his Brahminical heritage, he founded the Navratan Committee, an anti-caste rainbow coalition, aimed at challenging entrenched caste hierarchies. While he wrote two books on Buddhism, his book Mool Bharatvasi aur Arya (1930) is his most significant work, where he reiterated the argument about the indigenous inhabitants having been dispossessed by the Aryan invaders—a thesis already advanced by Phule and Acchutanand. Basu describes, in detail, how Bodhanand eschewed archaeological and anthropological sources. Instead, he relied on an eclectic range of textual materials, including Hindu scriptures, to substantiate his argument. He also invoked the authority of nationalist figures such as Nehru, Gandhi, Tilak and Tagore while citing noted historian Ramesh Chandra Dutt and scientist Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray in support of his thesis. Offering a scathing denunciation of the caste system, he hoped, like Phule and Acchutanand, for an alliance between the sudras and atisudras to challenge the dominance of the ‘upper’ castes. Like Ambedkar and Phule, he too lauded the democratic ideals of Western liberal thought in contesting social inequality.
In the concluding chapter, Basu traces the ‘Genealogies of the Theory of an Aryan Invasion of India’ through a critical engagement with the theories of Indologists and Orientalists such as William Jones and Max Muller. Offering a concise overview of the reformist-revivalist efforts of the Arya Samaj, particularly its Shuddhi campaigns directed at the Chamars of the United Provinces, Basu points out the vanguardist position of the Chamars among the Dalits of northern India. Significantly, several Chamar intellectuals, initially drawn to the Arya Samaj but later disillusioned by its ideological duplicity, went on to play a foundational role in the emergence of the Adi-Hindu movement, thereby fostering a vibrant ‘culture of literary dissent’ in the 1920s and 1930s.
At the height of the Indian nationalist movement, when the caste question had been relegated to the margins, these three anti-caste radicals played a crucial role in contesting this erasure. Basu’s detailed study of the Adi-Hindu movement, its three ideologues—their writings and intertwined anti-caste trajectories—constitutes a valuable contribution to a field marked by glaring lacunae. By foregrounding the politics of caste resistance that this triad of heterodox thinkers embody, Basu’s book not only adds to the existing corpus of anti-caste literature, but also compels a re-evaluation of dominant historiographical frameworks.
Preeti Gupta Dewan is Associate Professor, Deshbandhu College, University of Delhi, Delhi.