The nine-year-old boy and his two companions, a brother and a cousin, were excited. The boy’s father, who was working in another town, had invited them to spend their summer vacation with him in Koregaon.1 The boys dressed in their best finery for the occasion, donning tailored jackets and brocade caps. They were thrilled to be travelling by train for the first time. They had written to their father with details of their train’s arrival at 5 p.m., but the message never reached him and they found no one waiting for them when they arrived.
After waiting for a while, they asked people on the platform what they could do. Questions arose: who were these boys? They soon revealed they were Mahars, members of an untouchable community. Suddenly, no one was willing to be helpful. After an hour and a half of waiting helplessly, they tried to engage a cart to transport them to their father’s place, several hours away by road from the train station. There were several carts sitting idle but none available to them to rent.
Finally one cart was found, but the cartman was unwilling to drive the cart for fear of being ‘polluted’. In the end the boys had to agree to pay double the fare and drive the cart themselves, with the driver walking alongside. Many petty indignities were inflicted upon them on the long journey: people along the route refused to serve them water because of their caste, they could not let their guard down for fear that the cartman might do them harm, and they stayed anxiously awake at an overnight rest stop, segregated from others, terrified of what terrors might be lurking in the dark.
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The boys’ excitement at their holiday trip had given way to an overwhelming sense of humiliation at their inhumane treatment for no reason but their caste identity. The nine-year-old boy on whom this incident had a profound influence was called Bhim.
Babasaheb Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, MA, MSc., PhD, DSc, DLitt, Bar-at-Law, was born on 14 April 1891 into a family of Mahars, a community from the Konkan area of the Bombay Presidency (a province of India during the Raj that largely comprised parts of the present-day states of Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Karnataka). The Mahars had historically been deemed untouchable in the prevailing highly stratified caste system. To be born an untouchable in nineteenth-century India was to be consigned to the depths of human degradation. Ghettoized by other communities, refused permission to draw water from a communal well or to bathe in the same ponds or rivers as caste Hindus, members of the community were regarded as outcastes whose mere shadow, let alone touch, was deemed polluting by their social ‘betters’ in the Hindu caste system. They were confined to the most abject of tasks—manual scavenging, the cleaning of toilets and sewers, the disposal of human and animal waste, the skinning of dead animals, and so on.
Most of them never saw the inside of a school, except to sweep its floors. Caste Hindus neither accepted food or water from their hands, nor served them: the mere exchange of food or water with one of them was deemed polluting. Illiterate, malnourished, abused, and despised, members of the community were, for the most part, condemned from birth to a life of misery, malnutrition, exclusion, and penury. As with everything in India, there were variations within this general picture. Some untouchable sub-castes fared marginally better than others.
Their roles had evolved through history in different ways at different places and they received opportunities that elevated their status slightly above others. Ambedkar’s Mahar sub-caste was one such. The Mahars were traditionally relegated to various menial jobs and mainly served as Veskars or watchmen, though Ambedkar’s family played a more significant role in their ancestral village, Ambavade, in Ratnagiri district, where its members served as palanquin-bearers for the idol of the temple goddess. Some found work as labourers in the textile mills of Bombay and Nagpur. But the Mahars also had a proud martial tradition, serving as soldiers in the guerrilla armies of the Marathas, and the British were quick to recognize this, pressing them into service in the ranks of the East India Company and subsequently of the British Indian Army. (One interpretation of the word Mahar is that it is derived from ‘Maha-Ari’, or ‘the great enemy’, an etymology that reflects the Mahar combination of a belligerent spirit and a fighting temperament.)
The Mahar Regiment duly acquired some distinction as fierce and heroic fighters. Both Ambedkar’s father, Ramji Maloji Sakpal, born in 1848, and his grandfather, Maloji Sakpal, before him, served in the regiment, as did his mother Bhimabai’s ancestors, and thus it was that he was born in the British cantonment of Mhow, on 14 April 1891, the last child of his parents.
Ramji Sakpal was getting on in age by then and retired from the army as a subedar in 1893, when little Bhim was just two. The large family could not subsist on his meagre pension and Ramji took up a job the following year as a PWD storekeeper in the district town of Satara.
Bhim, a somewhat rowdy infant, with a taste for a fight and an unwillingness to admit defeat in any situation he found himself in, was enrolled at the age of five at a local school in Dapoli, in Ratnagiri district. (The enrolment was not unusual even for an untouchable soldier’s child, since education was compulsory for the children of the military. Indeed, not only Bhim’s father, but also the women of his family were literate.) As a young boy in Satara, according to his biographer, Dhananjay Keer, Bhim was ‘pugnacious, resourceful and fearless…. Taking up a classmate’s challenge to walk in the rain without an umbrella, he had come to class in wet clothes.
This excerpt from Shashi Tharoor’s ‘Ambedkar: A Life’ has been published with permission from Aleph Book Company.
Source: The Print
