The satyagraha that was forgotten by history

Do you know that there was satyagraha prior to the salt satyagraha in India? While the Dandi March has international recognition, this particular fight remains forgotten by history and has been denied its happy ending. This was the fight for water and more importantly a fight for respect.

Ambedkar breaking barriers by drinking water from the public tank in Mahad; Image source: Wikipedia

Unknown to most, three years before the Salt Satyagraha, the Mahad March happened. Both were a fight against injustice. Both challenged the authorities. Both were based on the demand for the basic rights of humans. Dandi March was a fight for the basic right of salt without taxation and the Mahar march was for the basic right of water for the depressed class.

While one was led by the father of the nation, Gandhi and the other one was led by none other than the most learned politician of that time, Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar.

The Indian caste system for years had denied the Dalits the basic rights of being human. One of them was that they couldn't draw water from public tanks or ponds. If a Dalit dared to touch the water, then he was badly thrashed or sometimes even killed. After that, the water that the Dalit had touched was purified. Only then did the water become fit for consumption of the upper caste.

Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar after completing one of his many degrees came back to India from the London School of Economics. He was hoping that some changes in society would be experienced by him. To his despair, even after being the first Indian to get a doctorate from London as well as Columbia, he was still a Dalit, with no rights, in his nation.

When he heard that an old man’s tongue had been cut because he tried drinking from a pond in Mahad, he decided to launch a satyagraha to earn the basic right to water for the Dalits. How cruel is it to deny humans something like water, which belongs to all?

On 20 March 1927, along with around 1000 Dalits he marched to Mahad’s Chavdar pond and took two sips of the water. Many Dalits followed him and drank from it.

The British led committee of the Bombay Legislative Council had brought the resolution that all places like the Mahad’s pond could be used by everyone. In fact, it was Ambedkar who implemented this law.

Ambedkar made a speech regarding the type of Satyagraha he had envisioned. He told the Dalits to abandon the practices that defined their untouchability like doing menial labour and eating dead animals. he believed that when there would be no one to clean the society, one would realise that the Dalit community had an existence too.

He had firmly said that it must be peaceful in nature. Violence was never the solution. He only wished to work in accordance with law and reason.

However, this wasn't the ending which he got. Rumours flew in that the untouchables were going to enter the temples that only belonged to upper castes after they had contaminated the pond. The upper castes took their sticks and got into the Dalit living areas and beat out people including women, children and old. Many lost their lives, a loss that isn't recorded by history.

The entire pond was purified by the Brahmans with cow urine and cow dung in order for it to become fit for consumption for the upper castes.

Do you know that 20 March, the day of Mahad satyagraha is recognized as the social empowerment day? What’s the point of naming a day that is not remembered by most?

While Gandhi’s salt satyagraha on 12 March 1930, where he challenged the British authority had its happy ending, the prior remains undocumented up to a great extent bereft of its ending. Ambedkar fought his entire life to improve the lives of the Dalits, yet to this day, in many places, Dalits still don't get access to the same public goods that the upper castes of Hindus do.