What happened at Koregaon Bhima, and why do people still go there on 1 January?
On 1 January 1818, at Koregaon on the Bhima river, a small British East India Company force that included many soldiers from the Mahar community — the same community held untouchable in the surrounding society — held its ground against a far larger army of the Peshwa, the Brahmin ruler of the Maratha state. The British later raised an obelisk at the site listing the fallen, and among the names carved on it are Mahar names.
That pillar is why the day matters to the Dalit movement, and Ambedkar himself visited it on 1 January 1927. The meaning read into it is not a celebration of colonial conquest but of something else: men treated as too polluting to draw water from a village well had stood as soldiers and prevailed against the very regime whose social order had degraded them. Peshwa rule was remembered as especially harsh towards untouchables, so the memory turns a British military footnote into a symbol of Dalit valour and self-respect.