No Indian is familiar with the term “Hindu” as applied to his religion in 1921

The 1921 Census of India Report noted that ‘No Indian is familiar with the term “Hindu” as applied to his religion’. In 1911, the census commissioner E. A. Gaits issued a circular with certain questions to help the census officers to determine the viability of ‘Hindu’ as the religion common to all those disparate groups. Most of these questions pertained to the wall of separation between the castes. For example, the circular asked all castes to answer if they had access to the upper caste temples; whether they had access to a Brahmin priest for the ceremonies in life such as weddings; whether they were familiar with the gods of the upper castes. If it could be demonstrated that the disparate caste groups shared, at least occasionally, the same cultural spheres and activities, then there could be a case for a single religious category encompassing them all. The answers recorded for these questions made it obvious that this was not the case, and that the upper castes were then a small minority in the subcontinent. The upper castes soon saw the danger, protested against the circular, and forced it to be withdrawn. Their leaders expected that similar circulars would be used again. They therefore proceeded to invent the very customs and enforce the very practices which would be able to meet the Gaits criteria in the future, including temple entry programs for the lower castes, which are euphemistically called ‘social reforms’. These cosmetic changes left the material conditions such as land ownership and political power of the lower castes unchanged, which was of course their goal. Hence, the very criteria that had failed in the ‘Gaits’ circular’ would form the basis for the new ‘Hindu’ religion.

The subsequent census operations of the Raj, especially the 1921 and 1931 census, made the demographic difference between the upper and lower castes even more apparent. Even the Muslim religious minority were found to have outnumbered the upper castes. This fact would not have had any special sense if not for the modern legal and electoral procedures that were being introduced by the Raj, such as the ‘Caste Disabilities Removal Act’ in the mid nineteenth century, the increasing devolution of government to elected Indians in 1919 and 1935, and separate electorates for lower castes. Thus, under the colonial introduction of reforms, religious conversions, modern democratic electoral processes, and laws criminalising caste-based discriminatory practices in the early twentieth century, the lower castes had an opportunity for the first time in millennia to become visible as the claimants of public good, and to seek freedom and equal rights. These freedoms were not spectacular but as quotidian as the right to walk the same streets as everyone else, the right to drinking water of a village, the right to education, and the right to ask for a wage for the labour performed.

However, these freedoms are still not available to the majority of the people.

The reform measures of the colonial administration were met with extreme reproach by the upper castes who were fighting for ‘transfer of power’ under the leadership of the coalition of interests that was the Congress party. They anticipated that the social hierarchy of the caste order would not survive in a constitutional democracy based on principles of political, material and social equality. Under the Congress coalition, upper caste leaders including Gandhi launched agitations against these very reforms. But they were also confronted with the growing agitations from the lower caste people; in 1924 in Kerala, the lower caste people began their agitation for their right to walk on all streets including those in front of the temples which considered them as ‘polluting’. In 1927 B. R. Ambedkar led the agitation of thousands of Dalits in Mahad (a place in Maharashtra) to drink water from the public tank. When the upper castes opposed it with the use of force, the Bombay High Court had to intervene and rule in favour of the lower castes.