Scheduled Caste vis-à-vis Dalit (terminology)
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‘Dalit’ or SC?
A history of the expression ‘Dalit’
Dalit: A tortuous journey over 200 yrs, January 25, 2018: The Times of India
It has been through a journey spanning nearly two centuries that the term “Dalit” denoting “the oppressed” has ironically metamorphosed into an appellation signifying “assertion and self respect”.
Perhaps its emergence as the pan-Indian term for scheduled castes led to government functionaries inadvertently start using it in official work – leading to Madhya Pradesh HC on Tuesday ruling that only constitutional terminology, ‘SCs’, be used in official communication.
The court rightly called out the unwarranted blurring of lines between the official and the unofficial, but it only reinforced the power and appeal that “Dalit” has come to pack in contemporary society.
Says Vivek Kumar, senior sociologist in Jawaharlal Nehru University, “the term has become an assertion of identity accorded by the community upon themselves and not by the upper castes.”
The pithy summation aptly captures the symbolism of “Dalit” – a word that goes back to 1830s. According to Vivek Kumar, “Dalit” finds mention in 1831-compiled Marathi-English dictionary by JJ Molesworth — an army officer of the East India Company. Dynamic social reformer from Maharashtra Jyotiba Phule used shudras/ati-shudras and Dalit/pat-Dalit. In 1935, the greatest of emancipators B R Ambedkar used the term in a pamphlet he brought out to organise a congregation of “untouchables” who by then had begun to try to throw away the yoke of upper caste subjugation.
However, Ambedkar himself preferred to call his community “Depressed Classes”. For the community, it has been a tortuous search for the right name to call themselves. In the high caste dictated social order, they were variously referred to as “asprashya” (untouchable), “antaj” (last born), “antwaseen” (residing last).
It was a state of limbo — shunned by Hindu caste system but considered part of Hindu faith — that nudged “untouchables” towards a quest for identity. It went through experiments which intensified as the fire of independence struggle spread. Awakening to the need that they too needed freedom from caste subjugation as compatriots sought from the British, self-respect movements spawned across regions. 1920s reflected a stress on indigenous roots -- ati-Hindu, ati-Dravida, ati-Andhra, ati-Karnataka. A rebellious Manguram Walia in Punjab called the untouchables ‘ad-dharma’. There was also an adi-Hindu movement in UP . First steps, they were bound to be splintered.
But the dramatic birth of two pan-India platforms – Mahatma Gandhi and Congress – changed the course of Dalit movement beyond recognition. After Gandhi brought out “Harijan” newspaper, Congress became the vehicle to spread the name in every nook and corner of the country. The 1935 India Act settled on clubbing the “untouchables” under a Schedule – and thus was born the label, SCs. But it was officialese, bereft of the punch that a subaltern identity seeks. Into the vacuum of disappearing Dalit platforms, post-independence, stepped in the militantintellectual movement -- Dalit Panthers – in 1970. It resurrected the term from the anonymity of history.
Culluvagga Vinaya Pittaka, Molesworth’s Marathi dictionary (1831), Jyotiba Phule onwards
Term Has Been Sustained By Activism In Community
Like the muchdiscussed symbol of their martial triumph over caste Hindus — Bhima Koregaon — even the word ‘Dalit’ has a British link.
It was an army officer of the East India Company, J J Molesworth, who mentioned the word Dalit in a Marathi-English dictionary way back in 1831. It was also used by radical reformer Jyotiba Phule and recorded for contemporary use and for posterity by the British.
JNU sociologist Vivek Kumar traced the roots of the word to further back in history. “Dalit is found in Buddhist text Culluvagga Vinaya Pittaka,” he said.
To many Indians, the word Dalit is inextricably linked to Bahujan Samaj Party. Its founder Kanshi Ram travelled the length and breadth of the country using the term to mobilise the caste base and to unify the community in its struggle for self-respect. Younger observers identify the word with the volatile debates of the 1990s, when BSP burst on to the national scene in a political assertion, accompanied by harsh attacks on Mahatma Gandhi and his coinage ‘Harijan’.
What Kanshi Ram did was to pit ‘Dalit’ against ‘Harijan’ and dub the latter as patronising and humiliating. “If we are god’s children, are caste Hindus the children of the devil?” he, and his protege Mayawati would repeatedly ask. The message did the trick and Dalits rallied around the blue banner.
To greying heads, though, this was familiar trope from earlier decades when Dalit Panthers first emerged. In 1972, Namdeo Dhasal and his colleagues formed the outfit and the Maharashtra-based group consecrated Dalit in the subaltern discourse.
However, Dalit Panthers and BSP borrowed from over 200 years of history during which the ‘untouchables’ moved from accepting discrimination as fate to fighting for equality. It started with a search for identity away from the one ordained by religious tradition. The community was variously referred to as “asprashya” (untouchable), “antaj” (last born), “antwaseen” (residing last).
The 19th century revolutionary reformer Jyotiba Phule used “shudras and atishudras”, and “Dalit and pat-Dalit” to refer to backwards and ‘untouchables’.
Like Phule, it again took a radical emancipator, B R Ambedkar, to put the word Dalit in currency. In 1935, Ambedkar used the term in a pamphlet to organise a congregation of ‘untouchables’. However, Ambedkar himself preferred to call his community “Depressed Classes” — that he used regularly during his lobbying with the English for the community.
The 1920s reflected a stress on indigenous roots — ati-Hindu, ati-Dravida, ati-Andhra, ati-Karnataka. A rebellious Manguram Walia in Punjab called the untouchables ‘ad-dharma’. There was also an adi-Hindu movement in Uttar Pradesh.
The dramatic emergence of two national platforms — Mahatma Gandhi and Congress — ensured the Dalit movement changed course. After Gandhi brought out ‘Harijan’ newspaper, Congress became the vehicle to spread the term. At the same time, the 1935 India Act clubbed ‘untouchables’ under a Schedule — and thus was born the label, “Scheduled Castes”.
The term SCs stuck, and spread. But it was officialese, impersonal, bereft of the punch a subaltern identity seeks. But it proved a long wait as Congress went about co-opting Dalit platforms and blunting the radical edge of the movement. Till the militant-intellectual Dalit Panthers movement arrived in 1970.
As the Panthers splintered, Dalit movements disappeared. But the irreversible activism in the community sustained the word itself. And then came the BSP and its militant tone.
In 1972, Namdeo Dhasal and his colleagues formed the Dalit Panthers and the group consecrated ‘Dalit’ in the subaltern discourse. Kashi Ram later pitted ‘Dalit’ against Gandhi’s ‘Harijan’ and dubbed the latter patronising and humiliating
CB Prasad: On the evolution of the term Dalit
A term tied to assertion and pride of community, September 5, 2018: The Times of India
Dalit ideologue Chandra Bhan Prasad explains what the term Dalit means to the community
The term Dalit, as a selfidentification nomenclature or a political expression, first arrived in May 1972. Coined by iconic Dalit minds of Maharashtra such as Namdeo Dhasal and JV Pawar, the organisation Dalit Panther emerged as an aspirational body to confront the repressive caste order. The Panthers were inspired by the Black Panther of the US, formed a decade earlier. In less than a decade, the term Dalit acquired pan-India recognition. It soon got associated with Dalit pride and used to defend and express the community’s dignity.
Not that the term, Dalit, didn’t exist before. But thought-leaders of the time chose it to exhibit Dalit assertion. The term Dalit was also to confront and counter Harijan, a term given by Gandhiji that the community resented. The term, Harijan, pictured a mass of people that are oppressed, weak, and docile, requiring sympathy of the right-minded Indians. Similarly, the term, Scheduled Castes, used by the government was considered too passively neutral to capture the community’s spirit.
In the year 1981, Kanshi Ram founded DS4, Dalit Shoshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti. Within years, DS4 had become a major social force. Hundreds of publications sprung with the term Dalit. Publications in Bangla, Gujarati, Punjabi and Tamil began lapping up the
term Dalit as a combative, aspirational identity. ‘Untouchable’ writers would now pre-fix Dalit to their name.
The media, the academia and the mainstream society gradually recognised the term Dalit. In Maharashtra, Marathi Dalit Sahitya questioned mainstream literature. Dalit Sahitya in the Hindi heartland turned into a major headache for traditional voices as many established notions in literature were now challenged. By late 1990s, truckloads of Dalit literature, including magazines, were being printed in most Indian languages.
In the 21st century, the new breed of panthers surfed the wave of globalisation to crisscross continents, and accord a new social identity to the community. The Dalit Diaspora celebrates this socially emancipative identity, and communicates with their roots back home. Like Black Capitalism, a section of the panthers are now votaries of Dalit Capitalism. Like the famous magazine Black Enterprise, Dalit entrepreneurship is now celebrated in a new magazine called Dalit Enterprise.
Not that the term, Dalit, didn’t exist before. But thought-leaders of the time chose it to exhibit Dalit assertion. The term Dalit was also to confront and counter Harijan, a term given by Gandhiji that the community resented
Government, court orders
HC bans use of word ‘Dalit’ by MP
January 23, 2018: The Times of India
The MP high court has banned the use of the word ‘Dalit’, especially in official government communication. The HC’s Gwalior bench issued the order while hearing a PIL pointing out that the word ‘Dalit’ was not mentioned in the Constitution. People belonging to different categories have been termed either ‘Scheduled Caste’ or ‘Scheduled Tribe’ in the Constitution. The HC has ordered that only the terms mentioned in the Constitution be used. The petitioner’s lawyer said the order would currently only be implemented in MP.
2918L GOI; 2019: Maharashtra
Prafulla Marpakwar , Sep 19, 2019: The Times of India
A year after the Centre asked all state governments to refrain from using the word ‘Dalit’ in official communication, the BJP-led Maharashtra government has asked all its departments not to use the word “in all official transactions, matters, dealings and certificates and instead use Schedule Caste or its appropriate translation in other national language(s)”.
A notification issued by the joint secretary of the social justice department D R Dingle says in keeping with directives issued by the Centre’s social justice ministry, the word ‘Dalit’ should be replaced with “Schedule Caste or Anusuchit Jati (in Marathi)”.
The Centre’s communication, first to state governments and later to the media, had come after the Madhya Pradesh high court and Bombay high court told the Central and state governments to stop using the word as it “does not find mention in the Constitution of India or any statute”.
Scheduled Castes who opposed the term ‘Dalit’
Meshram’s 13-year struggle to erase the term
Abhishek Choudhari, A 13-year struggle to erase a word, September 6, 2018: The Times of India
Life came full circle for Nagpur’s Pankaj Meshram last month when the I&B ministry issued a notification to media houses asking them to refrain from using the word ‘Dalit’. His struggle to get the word removed from every official communication started in 2006 when a Dalit family was lynched at Khairlanji, 80km from Nagpur, after a caste-related tussle.
Meshram came close to the only surviving member of the Bhotmange family which was massacred, and understood how caste dynamics worked in that rural belt. “The SC community faces a lot of discrimination in villages and ‘Dalit’ has become a symbol of oppression. When someone calls you a Dalit, it is only in a derogatory sense,” he said.
“I wrote to many departments asking them to stop using the word as it’s not mentioned in the Constitution. We are identified legally as ‘SC’ and that should be the official nomenclature. When all options were exhausted, in 2016 I filed a petition in the HC bench at Nagpur,” said Meshram.
Meshram’s lawyer Shailesh Narnaware’s main argument was that the word Dalit has no legal standing.
To the argument that ‘Dalit’ could be seen as empowering when used for, say, Dalit literature or movements like Dalit Panther, well-known theatre actor and director Virendra Ganvir disagreed. “Dalit is a condition, not an identity,” he said. “It’s a pathetic condition.”
But there are those who don’t subscribe to this point of view. One of them, former state minister Nitin Raut, said, “Dalit, as a word, is universally accepted as the name for the community. Don’t we use ‘Bahujan’ for OBC and ‘Adivasi’ for STs? What’s wrong with Dalit?”
The views of Dr. Ambedkar, Kanshi Ram, J.V. Pawar, Yashwant Manohar...
To Be or Not to Be a 'Dalit'? | Vruttant and Krittika | The Wire, 19/SEP/2018
The I&B ministry on August 7 [2018] issued an advisory to media houses to avoid using the term Dalit and opt for the more constitutional ‘scheduled castes’, giving six weeks to discuss and reach a conclusion.
The term Dalit has had a history of debate. It is found written earliest in the Vedas wherein it connoted something that is crushed or broken. ... In the mid 1900s, the term entered literature as a field, ... The 1960s saw the evolution of the term politically, its highest evolution seen in the formation of the Dalit Panther movement in the 1970s....
However, at around the same time, the term Dalit also started to gather dissent, giving rise to rejection and contradictions. Noted Ambedkarite thinker Yashwant Manohar recalls, “After Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar embraced Buddhism in 1956, the erstwhile untouchables and Dalits became Buddhists. Hence, the prevailing ideology since 1960-61 was that those who became Buddhists because of Babasaheb Ambedkar would not call their literature as Dalit Literature.” A very clear example of this contradiction is seen through the Maharashtra Dalit Sahitya Sangha. The organisation held its first conference, titled Dalit Sahitya Sammelan, in Mumbai in 1958 under the leadership of Annabhau Sathe. It held its second conference, again in Mumbai, in 1959 and the third conference in Pune in 1961.
By the third conference, the tide had changed, with many prominent members including T. P. Adsul, Vijay Sonawane and Raja Dhale starting to reject the use of the term Dalit, in light of Ambedkar’s decision to embrace Buddhism. The general consensus was that Ambedkar did not want the oppressed to remain ‘dalits’, and had asked them to embrace a new identity, that of Buddhists. The Maharashtra Dalit Sahitya Sangh was thus dissolved and took the new identity of Maharashtra Baudhha Sahitya Sangh in 1961 itself, and continued its journey onward. Interestingly, Raja Dhale, who was very vocal in his advocacy of the Buddhist identity, was one of the founding members of the Dalit Panthers. Since 1976, he publicly started advocating the term ‘Ambedkarite’ as a political and social identity...
This issue only became a hot-topic a couple of years back when activist Pankaj Meshram approached the Nagpur bench of the Bombay high court against the term Dalit, on the claim that it was derogatory and not empowering at all. His petition also challenged the legality of the using the term Dalit as opposed to the constitutional terms scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. The case finally saw Meshram win the petition, in March this year [2018], with the court declaring Dalit to be a unconstitutional term.
In a similar verdict in January this year[2018], the Gwalior bench of the Madhya Pradesh high court advised against the use of the term Dalit for the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. These cases brought out the dialectic being played out in Maharashtra all these years. Notably, in 2005, at a conference at Ulhasnagar, several Ambedkarite, Dalit, and progressive intellectuals like Baburao Bagul, Yashwant Manohar, Nagnath Kotapalli, Ramnika Gupta, Geeta Manjrekar, Ratanlal Sonagra and Pragya Pawar among others unanimously passed a proposal suggesting that they consciously replace the word Dalit with another word which indicated ‘self-respect’...
Moreover, Dr. Ambedkar, gave a big reason to his opponents and doubters. In his historic speech of Dadar in 1936 — ‘Emancipation What Way?’, he proclaimed that emancipation is only possible through a change in name, easily achievable through conversion. He asked the masses to choose a name that will have no “filth” attached to it, and pinned it as the responsibility of the “untouchable class” to annihilate caste, even though it was propagated by the caste-Hindus...
Such was his scholarly conviction which emphasised the need of name (category) change, and he finally did it in the conversion after a rigorous labour of 21 years...
Kanshi Ram gave a new identity to the people by bringing about a political revolution. He rejected the old filthy political categories and gave the new identity of Bahujan – a political identity which could unify an even larger mass. Ambedkar wrote in Bahushkrit Baharat in 1935 that one needs to change the shetji-bhatji rajya (Baniya-Brahmin rule) and give power to 80% marginalised people to gain equality. Kanshi Ram helped realise this through a new Bahujan identity. By rejecting the name Dalit, he worked extensively to show Bahujan as a powerful force. The positive connotation of a positive nomenclature was very much in tandem with the samyak wisdom of the Buddha: “Bahujan hitay, bahujan sukhay.” Kanshi Ram converted Buddha’s social, material and spiritual philosophy into a political identity.
Another co-founder of the Dalit Panthers, J.V. Pawar, said in a recent artice, “We established Dalit Panthers keeping in mind that today we are dalits (neglected) but one day our status will change. Dalitism is nothing but a status. We have changed that status. Backwardness should not be our identification. We are not dalits now.” It is commendable how Pawar has, in spite of being a founding member, not shied away from accepting the flaw of using the term Dalit.
Vruttant and Krittika are PhD researchers at JNU, New Delhi.
Yashwant Manohar to The Times of India, 1 Feb 2021: ‘Don’t use the word Dalit, I’m against it. I call myself a progressive writer and do not identify myself with any caste or religion.’
