Mahad, and the right to drink water

1927

Mahad, and the right to drink water

Mahad, Colaba district · 20 March 1927

The tank was public, the municipality had opened it by resolution, and no Untouchable could drink from it. Several thousand people walked down and drank. It took the courts ten years to agree.

In August 1923 the Bombay Legislative Council passed a resolution, moved by S.K. Bole, declaring that public places maintained out of public funds — water sources, wells, dharma shalas, schools, courts — were open to the Depressed Classes. In January 1924 the municipality of Mahad passed its own resolution giving effect to it. The Chavdar Tank in Mahad was public, it was maintained out of public money, and by two separate resolutions anyone could drink from it. In practice no Untouchable did, because the law said one thing and the town said another, and only one of them was enforced.

That gap is the subject of this chapter and it is the subject of most of his life. A right that nobody will enforce is not a weaker right but a different kind of thing altogether — a statement about what a government would like to be true.

On 19 and 20 March 1927 a conference of the Depressed Classes met at Mahad, called to press for the Bole resolution to be honoured. Reported attendance runs from about two and a half to ten thousand. On the second day, after the speeches, the delegates walked down to the tank with Ambedkar at the head of them, and he drank from it, and they drank from it. The act took a few minutes and was entirely orderly.

What followed took ten years. A rumour spread through the town that the crowd intended to enter the Vireshwar temple next. Caste Hindus attacked the delegates with sticks, and went on to the sheds where they were lodged. Ambedkar restrained his people from retaliating, on the ground that a riot would end the argument on the attackers' terms; the injured were treated and the conference dispersed. The tank was then ritually purified with the five products of the cow. The municipality repealed its resolution. The dispute went into the courts as a claim that the tank was private property, and the courts did not settle it until 1937.

The march was never really about the water. It was a test of whether a right that existed on paper existed anywhere else.

Something else happened at Mahad that is left out of most accounts. Several hundred women attended, and he addressed them separately. What he told them was not about water. It was that they should stop wearing the marks by which an Untouchable woman could be identified at a distance and made to stand aside, should wear the sari as caste Hindu women wore it, should give up the customs that the caste order had assigned to them, and should educate their daughters. He returned to the position of women in every decade of his life afterwards, and it ended his career in government.

A second conference was called for 25 and 26 December 1927. The plan was another march to the tank. A court injunction stopped it, and Ambedkar obeyed the injunction — the man who had just been beaten off a public tank submitted to a court order restraining him from returning to it, and said so publicly. Instead, on the evening of 25 December, in front of the pandal, a copy of the Manusmriti was placed on a pyre built for the purpose and burned. The resolution to burn it was moved by a Brahmin follower of his, and Brahmins carried it out.

The Manusmriti is an ancient Sanskrit text of law and social ordering, and it is the text most often produced when someone wants scriptural authority for the caste order. It sets out the duties, the entitlements and the punishments of each caste, and it does so unequally by design: the same offence carries a different penalty according to who commits it and against whom, and the penalties prescribed for a Shudra who hears the Vedas recited are of a kind that does not admit of a benign reading. Ambedkar's case was that untouchability was not a village prejudice that scripture had failed to correct, but an order that scripture had established, and that a movement attacking the practice while leaving the text sacred was attacking a symptom.

The burning was condemned widely, including by reformers who had supported the march, and it cost him allies who never came back. It also did something no march had done: it moved the argument from what Untouchables were permitted to do to what Hinduism itself was, and it made that a question anyone could see being asked.

The litigation ran for a decade. On 17 March 1937 the Bombay High Court dismissed the appeal of the men claiming the Chavdar Tank as private property, and the right to drink from it was finally established in law. Ten years, for a tank in a small town that two resolutions had already declared open. He was by then a member of the province's legislature and had spent the intervening decade concluding that this was not an efficient way to obtain anything.

Decision point · 1927

The injunction, and the fire

It is December 1927 and the tank at Mahad is still shut. In March several thousand delegates walked down to the Chavdar Tank and drank from it, under two resolutions — the Bombay Legislative Council's of August 1923 and the Mahad municipality's of January 1924 — that had already declared it open to them. They were attacked with sticks in the town and in the sheds where they were lodged. The tank was afterwards purified with the five products of the cow, the municipality repealed its resolution, and the men claiming the water as private property have gone to court.

A second conference has been called for 25 and 26 December, and the plan is a second march to the tank. A court injunction has stopped it.

He is thirty-six and a barrister. Everything he has done so far he has done through resolutions, evidence, petitions and law — and the law has now been used to keep him away from a tank that the law says he may drink from. The conference will meet either way.

You have just read what he did, so this is not a guess. Every option below was actually open to him. Choose the one you would have taken, and each road is then set out as the record has it, including what came of it elsewhere or later. Where the record runs out the page stops, rather than guessing at how the roads he passed up would have turned out.

What would you have done?

March anywayLead the delegates down to the tank in defiance of the injunction, and let the town and the courts do what they will.What he didWhat you chose
What defiance at Mahad costs is nine months old at this point and is not in dispute. In March the delegates were beaten in the town and in the sheds, and Ambedkar held his own people back from answering it on the ground that a riot would end the argument on the attackers' terms. Nothing between March and December had improved that arithmetic, and the claim to the tank was now in front of the same courts whose order he would be breaking.
Obey, and keep to speechesAccept the injunction, hold the conference as a conference, pass resolutions, and let the litigation take its course.What he didWhat you chose
The litigation was already running, and how fast it ran is a matter of record rather than of speculation. On 17 March 1937 the Bombay High Court dismissed the appeal of the men claiming the Chavdar Tank as private property. Ten years, for a tank in a small town that two resolutions had already declared open — and he spent the intervening decade concluding that this was not an efficient way to obtain anything.
Go for the templeMake true the rumour that started the violence in March, and turn the conference towards entry to the Vireshwar temple.What he didWhat you chose
This road was taken, three years later and forty miles away, and its result is known. The satyagraha at the Kalaram temple in Nashik began in March 1930, was organised by his colleagues, and was conducted with exactly the restraint the method requires. It ran, on and off, for five years. Volunteers were beaten. The doors did not open.
Obey, and burn the bookObey the injunction to the letter — and then, on the evening of 25 December, in front of the pandal, burn the text that supplies caste with its scriptural authority.What he didWhat you chose
The injunction was obeyed to the letter and the book burned on the evening of 25 December. The resolution to burn it was moved by a Brahmin follower of his, and Brahmins carried it out. It was condemned widely, including by reformers who had supported the March march, and it cost him allies who never came back.

What followed

Both halves of it are the decision, and either without the other would have been a different one. Obeying kept the claim to the tank alive in a court that took ten more years to grant it, and it was done in public — the man who had been beaten off a public tank in March submitting to an order forbidding him to go back to it, so that nobody could mistake the submission for a retreat. Burning the Manusmriti moved the argument from what Untouchables were permitted to do to what Hinduism itself was, and made that a question anyone could see being asked.

He had not stopped using the law. He had stopped expecting it to be enough.

Source note

The Bole resolution, the Mahad conferences, the address to the women's meeting and the December burning are documented in the Government of Maharashtra edition of his Writings and Speeches and in the contemporary Marathi press, including his own Bahishkrit Bharat. The 1937 judgment is reported as Narhari Damodar Vaidya versus Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Bombay High Court, 17 March 1937. Reported crowd figures for 20 March vary between roughly two and ten thousand, so no single number is given here.