Sitting on the school verandah:

The ideology and practice of

’untouchable’ educational
protest in late nineteenth-century
western India

Philip Constable
University of Central Lancashire

In 1882 the Indian Education Commission affirmed that all government-aided schools
should be open to all castes and communities. It stated:

The educational institutions of government are intended by us to be open to all

classes and we cannot depart from a principle which is essentially sound and the
maintenance of which is of first importance. It is not impossible that in some
cases, the enforcement of the principle may be followed by a withdrawal of a
portion of the scholars, but it is sufficient to remark that those persons who
object to its practical enforcement will be at liberty to withhold their contribu-
tions and apply their funds to the formation of schools on a different basis.’1

On the very next pages of the report, however, this affirmation was strongly quali-
fied :

But even in the case of government or board schools, the principle affirmed by
us must be applied with caution. It is not desirable for masters or inspectors to

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Vasant Moon and Raja Dhale for their help during
the research of this article. The research was made possible by grants from the Indian Trust
for Arts and Cultural Heritage and the British Academy.

1
Report of the Indian Education Commission, 1882, India Office Library, London (hereafter
IOL), p. 515.
 384

endeavour to force on a social change which with judicious treatment will be

accepted by society. If the low-caste community seek an entrance into the cess
school, their rights must be firmly maintained, especially in the secondary insti-
tutions where there is no alternative of a special school for them to attend. It is,
however, undesirable to urge them to claim a right about which they are them-
selves indifferent.22

S. Nurullah and J.P. Naik characterised this educational strategy as ’a policy of

compromise and slow but persistent attack’ on social and religious prejudices on
the subject of untouchability, which ’began to show valuable results in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century’. They argued that ’once the public realised that
threats direct or indirect, would not make government yield on this point, it slowly
gave up its opposition and began to accept the presence of untouchable pupils in
schools as an inevitable corollary of the new education which they so keenly
desired’.3 Nurullah and Naik’s emphasis on the role of the colonial government in
promoting untouchable education has, however, been substantially modified in
subsequent years, and in large part the mantle of promoter of untouchable educa-
,
tional development has been shifted from the colonial government and bestowed
on missionary institutions.4 In consequence, the role of the ’militant missionary’ has
become enshrined in many texts as the principal dynamic behind untouchable educa-
tional and social change, such as in the works of Duncan Forrester and G.A. Oddie.5
More recently, growing recognition of the limitations imposed on missionaries by
the Indian social context has led to a qualification of this militancy, such as in the
work of Koji Kawashima and Dick Kooiman, and the emphasis has increasingly
shifted on to the determination of missionary activities by traditional Indian social
and political structures, for example in the works of Susan Bayly and Henriette
Bugged This article relates in part to this latter perspective and challenges the
primacy which earlier analyses have given to Western institutional agency (be it
governmental or missionary) as the force behind untouchable educational change

Ibid.,
2 p. 517.
3 S. Nurullah and J.P. Naik,
A History of Education in India, Bombay, 1951, pp. 423-24.
4 The word ’untouchable’ is used in this article in a contestatory sense of ’people unjustly
stigmatised or discriminated against on the grounds of untouchability’ (as is common in con-
temporary dalit Marathi writing on this period).
5
D.B. Forrester, Caste and Christianity: Attitudes and Policies on Caste of Anglo-Saxon
Protestant Missionaries in India, London, 1979; G.A. Oddie, Social Protest in India: British
Protestant Missionaries and Social Reform, 1850-1900, Delhi, 1979.
6
K. Kawashima, Missionaries and a Hindu State: Travancore 1858-1936, Delhi, 1998; D.
Kooiman, Conversion and Social Equality in India: The London Missionary Society in South
Travancore in the Nineteenth-Century, Amsterdam, 1989; S. Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and
Kings: Muslims and Christians in South Indian Society, 1700-1900, Cambridge 1989; H. Bugge,
Mission and Tamil Society: Social and Religious Change in South India, 1840-1900, London,
1994.
 /385

in late nineteenth-century western India. It is argued that the principal agents of the
social and educational change experienced by untouchable communities were not
by and large colonial officials or even missionaries (although they could at times be
supportive), but untouchable Hindus and untouchable Christian converts them-
selves. In bringing to the forefront this dynamism of untouchable educational ide-
ology and practice in western India, this article, however, also questions the common
emphasis of Bayly, Kooiman and Bugge that low-caste Hindus used missionary
instruction (and conversion) solely to promote their social mobility by Sanskrit-
isation, or its replication in Christian ’caste’ forms. It is argued in this article that, at
times, low-caste Hindus sought to use missionary education (and conversion) to
develop indigenous ideologies/protests which aimed at freedom from caste struc-
tures, disabilities and untouchable discrimination. While the arguments of Kooiman,
Bayly, and Bugge recognise in varying degrees that low-caste groups incorporated
and transcended colonial (missionary) forms for their own purposes, it is argued
here that these authors seem to neglect the existence and dynamism of indigenous
ideologies for radical social transformation which were also generated in part by
this process of incorporation and transcendence.
In elaborating this interpretation of untouchable educational development this
article examines the interaction of the four principal groups involved in determining
untouchable educational development in the localities of Bombay Presidency in
the period between 1880 and 1900 when caste structures and disabilities have been
seen to have become increasingly rigid. These four main groups comprise caste
Hindu parents and officials of local schools, Protestant Christian missionaries,
Bombay government officials and, most importantly, untouchable parents and
activists themselves. The interaction of these groups is analysed principally in
three representative cases of educational discrimination on the grounds of untouch-
ability in late nineteenth-century western India. The first is a case study of a dis-
pute between the Bombay Church Missionary Society in Manmad and the Manmad
local board school in Nasik district in 1884-85. It focuses particularly on the am-
bivalence of many colonial government administrators on untouchable educational
rights in the light of the established practice of’downward filtration of education’.
The second case study analyses the violent attempts of the caste Hindu patel of
Ranjangao Ganpati (Sirur taluka, Pune district) to close down the local American
Marathi Mission School in 1880-87, and indicates the growing changes that un-
touchable use of missionary education could create within rural caste Hindu society
by the late nineteenth century. The third case study is a documentary of untouchable
protest to gain access to a government primary school in Dapoli, Ratnagiri district
in 1892-1901. It emphasises the growing strength and tenacity of untouchable protest
in some areas of Bombay Presidency by the 1890s, and stresses the Hindu-Christian
syncretic construction of untouchable ideology which gave this educational pro-
test its radical dynamism. Finally, within the context of a review of the historio-
graphical literature on government and missionary educational activities in India, it
is argued that while some ad hoc alterations of the educational structure by colonial
386

officials gave the semblance of untouchable inclusion in government schools,

government ambivalence on untouchable education generally facilitated the con-
tinuance of a predominantly caste Hindu construction of education and society in
late nineteenth-century western India. Moreover, it is suggested that while mission-
aries provided educational institutions for untouchable students, the demand for
such institutions was driven by untouchable communities rather than led by radical
missionary social agendas. The social protest which emerged from such education,
though often supported by missionaries in protection of their (potential) congrega-
tions, was largely initiated by untouchables themselves. Although often historio-
graphically characterised as submissive or even ignored in histories of the late
nineteenth century, some untouchable groups in western India led an increasingly
radical and widespread (although often unsuccessful) challenge in ideological and
practical terms to their educational exclusion from government schools and to
wider conservative trends in late nineteenth-century western India.

Soon after the Education Commission of 1882, conflict between the Church Mis-
sionary Society and the local board school at Manmad in Nasik district in 1884-85,
revealed the uncertainty and ambivalence of colonial officials, both in recognising
and controlling educational discrimination against untouchable students. Prior to
the Education Commission, there had already been substantial opposition to
untouchable education not only from caste Hindu parents and an outraged Indian
press, but also from colonial administrators like T.S. Hamilton, District Assistant
Collector in Ahmednagar, who, in July 1880, opposed the directive issued by
H.P. Jacob, Educational Inspector, North-East Division, that Mahars and Mangs
(who were regarded as untouchables) be admitted to all government schools in the
northern division of Bombay Presidency.’ Hamilton purported that similar steps
should not be taken to admit untouchable students to a school in Rahuri, Ahmed-
nagar district, as it would be offensive to caste Hindus who would withdraw their
children, resulting in the closure of the school.’ Even the Director of Public Instruc-
tion, K.M. Chatfield’s attitude was more ambivalent than his outward support of
Jacob would have led one to suppose. He wrote:

No order of government will amend matters. It is very desirable not to draw

attention to the subject, because the opinions of native society are day by day
changing and becoming more liberal and tolerant. And any government order
will draw a hard and fast line which will fix the standard beyond which opinion
will not attempt to go; whereas if the matter is left to the local committees, the

7
Gujarati Mitra, 29 August 1880; Gnyan Prakash, 6 September 1880, in Native Press Reports,
), IOL.
Bombay Presidency (hereafter NPR
8
Gnyan Prakash, 22 September 1881, NPR; Dnyanodaya, 29 September 1881.
 387

numbers will gradually advance beyond any standards that government could
now lay down, without an outcry from the native press.’
Other colonial administrators were more outspoken in their opposition. Like
Hamilton in Ahmednagar, the Bombay High Court Judge, West, for example, empha-
sised to the Education Commission in 1882, ’the impropriety and impolicy of forcing
high-caste Hindus and o,thers against their feelings to sit with Dheds and others like
them in the same place’. .10 As a result, when the Education Commission stated in
1882 that ’it is not desirable for masters or inspectors to endeavour to force on a
social change’, it effectively meant that an ambivalence in policy directives and
practice was condoned and accepted. As the case of Manmad emphasised in the
mid-1880s, the Education Commission had generally done little to make colonial
officials more attentive or aware of educational discrimination on the grounds of
untouchability or more assertive in taking definitive measures to counter such stig-
matisation.
In January 1884, the new brahman schoolmaster appointed to the local board
vernacular school at Manmad was alleged by Rev. Alfred Mainwaring, Superintend-
ent of the Church Mission Society, Malegaum, to have been encouraging students to
abandon the Church Mission Society’s Anglo-vernacular school at Manmad in
favour of the local board vernacular school, thereby destroying the previously
harmonious relations between the schools.&dquo; After visiting the local board school
in Manmad, the Deputy Educational Inspector in Nasik, B.R. Sahasrabuddhe,
argued that the new local board school committee had been simply trying to im-
prove the school which had been damaged by the absence of the previous master
on locust duty. Moreover, he indicated that only two students had been attracted

away from the mission school and not 20 as Mainwaring maintained.’2 As a result,
the Educational Inspector of the North-East Division, H.P. Jacob, warned the new
master not to deal unfairly with the mission school, while Mainwaring was in-
structed that parents were free to send their children to whichever school they
chose. The conflict in Manmad developed further, however, when, in response to a
petition from 35 caste Hindus in Manmad in January 1884, Jacob granted permis-
sion to the Manmad local board vernacular school to open an English class in direct
competition with the Anglo-vernacular mission school.’3 Mainwaring protested to
Jacob in March 1884 that the population of Manmad was only 3,786, with a likeli-
hood of only 35 boys being available to learn English, which made a second English
class, in addition to the mission’s Anglo-vernacular school of 50-60 students, a
provocative and unnecessary development. Moreover, Mainwaring indicated that
it was strictly against government policy to open a government or local board school/
class in the same locality as a state-aided mission school because it duplicated
9
Ed. Dept, 1881, Vol. 31; 1882, Vol. 32, Maharashtra State Archives, Bombay (hereafter MSA).
’°
Bombay Chronicle, 3 December 1882.
"
Mainwaring to Jacob, 25 January 1884, Ed. Dept, 1885, Vol. 39, MSA.
12
Sahasrabuddhe to Jacob, 15 February 1884, Ed. Dept, 1885, Vol. 39, MSA.
13
Jacob to Mainwaring, 27 February 1884, Ed. Dept, 1885, Vol. 39, MSA.
388

efforts and wasted funds.’4 Jacob concurred with Mainwaring on this interpret-
ation and cancelled the English class.&dquo;
The matter might have rested there if the caste Hindu inhabitants of Manmad
had not again petitioned Jacob on 22 March 1885 emphasising their reasons for
wanting a separate English class: namely that Christian instruction was objection-
able to caste Hindus as it allowed untouchable education and untouchables to
enter the same classroom as caste Hindu students.’6 Such was the petitioners’
objection that the leading Manmad petitioner, Govind Ramakrishna Deo, indicated
that they, with support from an influential brahman from Vinchur, would pay Rs 15-20
per month in addition to tuition fees to defray the cost of the new English class. 17 The
root of this religious objection to the education of untouchable boys was alleged
by Mainwaring to have been almost solely instilled in the Manmad petitioners by
the new brahman schoolmaster of the local board school who was supported by
funds from Vinchur brahmans outside the local Manmad community.
Rather than seeing the source of the second petition in the direct objection of the
Manmad petitioners to untouchable students, Jacob, however, interpreted the pur-
port of the petition as a caste Hindu objection to taking instruction in an alien
Christian religion (of which one of many objectionable facets for caste Hindus was
untouchable education). In this light, Jacob wrote to Mainwaring that while the
particular objection to untouchable students was inadmissible, the general reli-
gious issue of objection to Christian instruction in Manmad might be solved by
implementing an (unsanctioned) Education Commission proposal to render Chris-
tian education ’optional’ in missionary schools where the religious conscience of
the students and their parents was opposed to Christian teachings.&dquo; Jacob indi-
cated that if Mainwaring compromised on this point, the caste Hindus of Manmad
could have no valid objection to the mission school or a reason for a new English
class. Otherwise, Jacob argued, the needs of the caste Hindu community in Manmad
were not sufficiently met, and whatever the student numbers available, the govern-
ment would be justified in allowing a new class or school.’9 Jacob’s motives were
unclear. Either he sought to resolve the issue of untouchable discrimination by
finding an alternative justification for a separate class in terms of caste Hindu
religious objection to Christian instruction, or, more subtly, as a result of his early
experience in the 1880s, he sought to remove caste Hindu religious objection to
Christian instruction in order to lay bare the Untouchable issue at its heart. Main-
waring sought advice from Robert Squire, Secretary to the Church Mission Society
in Bombay, but in effect Jacob must have realised that the reply was a foregone
conclusion since to render Christian instruction optional in missionary schools
was to abjure the very purpose of the missionary educational enterprise itself.

14
Mainwaring to Jacob, 6 March 1884, Ed. Dept, 1885, Vol. 39, MSA.
15
Jacob to Mainwaring, 8 March 1884, Ed. Dept, 1885, Vol. 39, MSA.
16
Squire to Richey, 25 April 1885, Ed. Dept, 1885, Vol. 39, MSA.
17
Chatfield to Richey, 7 February 1885, Ed. Dept, 1885, Vol. 39, MSA.
18
Jacob to Mainwaring, 9 March 1884, Ed. Dept, 1885, Vol. 39, MSA.
19
Jacob to Mainwaring, 24 March 1884, Ed. Dept, 1885, Vol. 39, MSA.
 389

Squire sought to return the problem to its original source. He pointed out that Jacob
needed to confront the real issue which was the objection of the 35 petitioners in
Manmad to the presence of Mahar and Mang students in the mission school. Effec-
tively, the government really had to consider the fact that its position in opening a
new class would simply be a concession to caste prejudice against untouchable
students. In Squire’s opinion, caste Hindu arguments of conscientious objection to
Christianity were no more than a smokescreen for this discrimination.2° As a result,
Jacob requested K.M. Chatfield, Director of Public Instruction, to refer the matter to
the Bombay government for consideration.
Chatfield, however, refused to refer the matter for wider government consider-
ation, and decided to sort it out himself. While Jacob had been wrangling with the
missionaries for a compromise, the Manmad caste Hindu petitioners, who were still
smarting from Jacob’s earlier volte face on the new class, had petitioned the Collect-
or of Nasik, W. Woodward, in September 1884. Woodward stated, in contrast to
Jacob’s vacillation, that while the people of Manmad definitely needed the Education
Department to manage their efforts, they merely wanted an English class at their
own expense to be attached to the present local board vernacular school (and not
a new school itself), and that, therefore, this should be authorised.2’ Chatfield chose

the logic of Woodward’s verdict, and on the basis of what he believed to be 18 years
of practical precedent, sanctioned the new English class on the grounds that the
government should encourage initiatives in secondary education funded by pri-
vate sources. 22 His appended proviso that the new English class in the local board
school in Manmad should not exclude untouchable students, was his only recog-
nition of the issue at stake in which his decision clearly favoured the caste Hindu
petitioners. Squire again objected that the caste antipathy generated by the new
brahman schoolmaster of the local board school could only serve to deprive the
mission school of caste Hindu students, leading to the closure of the mission
school through loss of its grant-in-aid from the government, and the consequent
exclusion of the untouchable students from education as they would not be allowed
into the new English class or the local board school, in spite of government policy
directives.23 Chatfield’s decision seemed to set a precedent for a widespread attack
by orthodox caste Hindus, not only on missionary educational programmes, but
also on untouchable educational rights.
Chatfield’s decision could not, therefore, go unchallenged by the Church Mis-
sionary Society. Mainwaring petitioned Chatfield in a letter which showed such a
detailed knowledge of Bombay educational regulations that it clearly angered
Chatfield.24 Citing chapter and verse, Mainwaring repeated the Church Mission
Society’s case against Chatfield’s decision to open the new class, namely that

20
Squire to Mainwaring, 19 July 1884, Ed. Dept, 1885, Vol. 39 MSA.
21
Woodward to Jacob, 3 October 1884, Ed. Dept, 1885, Vol. 39, MSA.
22
Chatfield to Jacob, 27 October 1884, Ed. Dept, 1885, Vol. 39, MSA.
23
Squire to Richey, 19 January 1885, Ed. Dept, 1885, Vol. 39, MSA.
24
Mainwaring to Chatfield, 17 January 1885, Ed. Dept, 1885, Vol. 39, MSA.
390

government rules did not allow a competing government school/class to be opened

against a missionary school where there were insufficient students in a locality.
Against Jacob’s decision, he reaffirmed his earlier views that the government could
not accept the religious claims of the caste Hindu petitioners against the mission
school when they had made no protest in the past. He also indicated that Jacob’s
ruling was based on an unsanctioned Education Commission proposal on con-
scientious objection. Above all, he pointed out that the petitioners’ essential aims
were unacceptable to the government because they sought to exclude untouchable
students from education by ’crushing out’ their mission school through the seces-
sion of the caste Hindu students. Whereas in most cases caste Hindu students
abandoned schools when untouchable students were placed in them, in the case of
Manmad, caste Hindu students had accepted missionary schooling with untouch-
able students when no other school was available, but seceded and tried to close
the missionary school once alternative education under a brahman master was pro-
vided. Chatfield was enraged by Mainwaring’s challenge to his authority and in-
verted Mainwaring’s legal and moral arguments to his own purpose. He wrote:

People may differ on the question whether religious teaching should be en-
forced in mission schools, but no one outside the Committee [of the Church
Mission Society, Bombay] can believe it to be right to enforce religious teaching
and at the same time deprive [parents] of the chance of educating their children
elsewhere.25

In terse self-justification, Chatwick refused to recognise that he was in effect

favouring caste Hindu religious prejudices, and fell back on the argument that not
only was it morally wrong to force Christian education on unwilling Hindu stu-
dents, but also it was well within government regulations to allow the petitioners to
improve their local board vernacular school with an English class at their own
expense.26
In spite of Chatfield’s refusal to refer the matter to the government, a petition
from Squire to J.B. Richey, Secretary to Government, brought the matter to the
attention of the Governor of Bombay, D.J.M. Reay.27 Reay consulted the govern-
ment regulations cited by Mainwaring against Chatfield in some detail and sought
to bring Jacob’s religious argument to reinforce Chatfield’s decision. He argued the
case for a new class on the basis of a caveat which he found in the regulations to
the effect that the refusal of a separate government school/class where there was
already an aided mission school was a binding rule only when there were ’no
practical difficulties’. He felt, however, that ’objectionable religious instruction’
was a practical difficulty.28 Reay, however, seems to have glimpsed beyond the

25
Chatfield to Richey, 7 February 1885.
26
Chatfield to Mainwaring, 28 January 1885, Ed. Dept, 1885, Vol. 39, MSA.
27
Squire to Richey, 19 January 1885.
28
Annotated comments of Reay, 12 February 1885, Ed. Dept, 1885, Vol. 39, MSA.
 /391

Christian-Hindu religious controversy, and to have perceived the ’caste issue’ at its
origin. He surmised that the whole issue may have been created and caste senti-
ments stirred up by the new schoolmaster’s attempts in Manmad to increase his
student numbers. He, therefore, qualified his judgement by advising a test of the
caste Hindu petitioners’ conviction for the new class by making the petitioners
pay fully for the new class, while preventing any students who had previously
accepted missionary education from changing to this new class. Meanwhile, un-
touchable children were to be allowed to enter the new English class if it was under
government management .21 These qualifications in the Governor’s proposal seemed
to reflect further the ambiguity of the Education Commission’s policy directives on
untouchable education, but his qualifications were largely lost in the Education
Department resolution issued on 2 March 1885 which voiced entirely a combination
of Chatfield’s position on private educational finance and Jacob’s religious justifi-
cation for the new class on the basis of conscientious objection.3o
In response, as Squire endeavoured to point out for a third time, the only ’prac-
tical difficulty’ was that the Bombay government seemed to wish to misconstrue or
ignore the cause of the case. The issue, for the people of Manmad, was not Chris-
tian religious instruction per se, which they had accepted for several years, but the
attendance of untouchable boys in the mission school: ’the caste question is the
real religious question, religious objection and caste are the same issue’. Squire
continued to indicate that the government, by favouring a small minority in Manmad
with a new class on the grounds of ’religious objection’ or private finance, missed
the point of the debate which was the objection of caste Hindus to untouchable
students. By its interpretation of the Indian Education Commission’s policy, the
government was allowing caste Hindu discrimination. Now that the class had,
however, been authorised by the government on 2 March 1885, Squire indicated
that, at the very least, if there was to be a separate class in Manmad which was based
on objection to untouchable students, it could not be a government or local board
class (as this contravened government rules which refused government aid to
schools/classes that did not admit untouchable students). It had to be in the form
of a private class under private management and funding (which could set its own
rules).&dquo; Jacob too had suffered a slight change of heart now that the caste Hindu
petitioners had secured their class. He too stressed that the attachment of the
English class to a local board school gave it governmental prestige (while being a
private class). It would, therefore, be more equitable to the mission school to estab-
lish the class as a separately managed and funded school, with a right to apply for
a government grant-in-aid, like the mission school, if it did not exclude untouchable

students.32 These arguments on the nature of the new class/school were also
intensified by the replacement of Chatfield (on leave) by W. Lee-Warner, as Acting

29
Ibid.,12 and 13 February 1885.
30
Education Resolution, 2 March 1885, Ed. Dept, 1885, Vol. 39, MSA.
31
Squire to Richey, 25 April 1885.
32
Jacob to Chatfield, 30 October 1884, Ed. Dept, 1885, Vol. 39, MSA.
392

Director of Public Instruction. Lee-Wamer was known for his sympathy for the
education of lower castes, and in controversion of Chatfield’s decision he backed
the position which Squire and Jacob had finally reached regarding the private and
non-governmental nature of the new class.33 The Govemor-in-Council, however,
summarily dismissed Lee-Wamer’s suggestion as further obfuscation. He pointed
out that Lee-Wamer had failed to see the pressure that was being put on the caste
Hindu community to accept mission schools, and that, in the process, Lee-Wamer
had departed from the principles of government neutrality in religious matters.3a
Where Lee-Warner’s proposal had at least sought to strike a balance, Reay seemed
to favour the rights of the caste Hindu community in Manmad in contravention of
the very principles of neutrality in religious matters which he himself advocated.
When the Church Mission Society, Free Church of Scotland Mission, Methodist
Episcopal Church and the American Marathi Mission jointly petitioned the Govern-
ment of India in August 1885, the Government of Bombay found itself in a difficult
situation.35 Reay, Governor of Bombay, marginalised the untouchable discrimin-
ation, which was the source of the case, and excluded Lee-Warner’s solutions from
the papers. Rather, he emphasised Chatfield’s and Jacob’s earlier arguments that
the Bombay government was bound to accept financial gifts from benefactors for
education, especially if they prevented students from being forced into mission
schools against their consciences.36 On the basis of the evidence presented, the
Governor-General came to agree with the Government of Bombay’s actions in open-
ing the new class. They insisted, however, that the class could not be attached to
the local board school and had to become a separate private school, which, ironic-
ally, was exactly Squire’s and Lee-Warner’s previous suggestion.&dquo; The missionary
victory was, nonetheless, mixed. They had ultimately been forced into accepting
the opening of an English school, but it was opened on the terms that Squire and
Lee-Wamer had suggested: that is as a self-funded and private institution, compet-
ing (if it admitted untouchable students) for a grant-in-aid on equal terms with the
missionary school. They, nonetheless, lost the argument on the question of reli-
gious education and conscientious objection. Above all, however, their consistent
and principal contention that the new school/class should not be opened as its
formation was based on discrimination against untouchable students was almost
completely neglected in favour of a policy which, in spite of the Bombay govern-
ment’s statements about untouchable welfare, upheld, first and foremost, caste
Hindu perceptions and needs. Such ambivalent official attitudes clearly did not
allow for a ’persistent attack’ on social and religious prejudices regarding un-

33
Lee-Warner to Richey, 15 May 1885, Ed. Dept, 1885, Vol. 39, MSA.
34
Comments of Reay, 21 May 1885, Ed. Dept, 1885, Vol. 39, MSA.
35
Church Mission Society to A. Mackenzie, Secretary to the Government of India, 19 August
1885, Ed. Dept, 1885, Vol. 39, MSA.
36
Comments of Reay, 12 September 1885; and Richey to Mackenzie, 3 October 1885, Ed.
Dept, 1885, Vol. 39, MSA.
37
Mackenzie to Richey, 30 November 1885, Ed. Dept, 1885, Vol. 39, MSA.
 /393

touchability. At best they reflected a failure to recognise discrimination on the

grounds of untouchability, and at worst they seemed to suggest a belief in the
superior merits of caste Hindu education and a search for convenient administra-
tive solutions within which to accommodate caste Hindu values and perspectives.
The reasons behind. this official failure to promote untouchable education in
this period were essentially two-fold: one pragmatic, the other ideological. The
Collector of Ratnagiri, W.W. Drew, provided the pragmatic reason in explaining his
failure to include untouchable students in school classrooms in Ratnagiri, Thana
and Kolaba districts in the 1880s and 1890s. He stated:

I found it was no use trying to get [the exclusion] remedied, because the educa-
tional authorities are against anything that might endanger the number of pupils
on their books, which an order that the low-caste boys were to be admitted into
the same room as the others would certainly do.3~

The same situation had certainly been experienced by Jacob due to his acceptance
of untouchable education in 1880. Local officials like Drew and Jacob found them-
selves faced with the insoluble dilemma of having to maintain school and student
numbers while recognising the right of untouchable students to enter a school with
the inevitable consequence of the withdrawal of its caste Hindu students. The
dilemma of local officials was openly recognised in the Bombay press. The Native
Opinion, for example, wrote in 1882:
The extension of education downwards is very much retarded by want of funds.
Every deputy inspector is expected to show an increase in the numbers of
schools and scholars in the district, while the grant remains fixed.... It would, we
dare say, rudely shake the comfortable notions of our government about the so-
called progress of our schools, if some honest deputy inspectors let them into
the secrets of their administration.39

As result, government officials, as in Manmad, often took the least line of resist-
a

ance, which was to overlook, to leave unchallenged or to find administrative com-

promises to educational discrimination against untouchable students, although

this was a compromise which often favoured caste Hindu values and society. Many
officials seem simply to have turned a blind eye or to have been unaware of caste
Hindu exclusion of untouchable students. Thus, at Revdanda village in Kolaba
district in July 1893, the caste Hindu villagers intimidated and persecuted the parents
of two Mahar boys sent to the local school until they withdrew the children. The
untouchable villagers petitioned the Collector of Kolaba to order the Superintendent
of Police and mamletdar of the taluka to re-admit the boys to the school and end the

38
Drew to Nugent, 9 May 1894, Ed. Dept, 1895, Vol. 45, MSA.
39
Native Opinion, 23 July 1882, NPR.
 394

intimidation of the parents. The Mahar petitioners, moreover, particularly pointed

out that both the Deputy Collector and the mamletdar had actually been in Revdanda
on the day the Mahar boys were removed from the school, but had not appeared to
have heard of the exclusion Other government officials simply seemed to allow
what they saw as inevitable under the circumstances. In 1893, for example, the
Educational Inspector, Northern Division, E. Giles, stated in relation to untouchable
attempts to enter Ahmedabad schools that:

... to place untouchable students in a school was effectively to empty that

school of caste Hindu students, and that neither Educational Department, Col-
lector or even the Government of India could alter this situation by mere order or
regulation. The only hope was that higher caste education over time would
remove the prejudice.4’

A second cause of failure was the ideological perspective of some officials which
demonstrated a clear moral preference for caste Hindu villagers over the educa-
tional aspirations of untouchable students. These perceptions were reflected in the
views of Giles who intimated at a negligent untouchable attitude to education, only
partly determined by poverty:
These Dheds, Bhangis, Chamars and Khalpa are most indifferent to education,
that even when the children come to school, they rarely remain there any time,
their attendance is usually most irregular. They see no benefit in education ...
and the problem of life is with them so pressing that parents cannot afford to
lose the earnings of children so soon as they are able to earn anything. 42

Others, like P.C.H. Snow, Assistant Collector ofPune, were critical of untouchable
labourers who rose above their menial village status. Like in many cases in Ahmed-
nagar district in the 1880s, Snow claimed that:

Soon after a missionary school is set up for the Mahars in a village, they affect
sort of independence and self-sufficiency, and decline to carry out the legit-
a
imate orders of the village officers. An intolerable friction ensues at once as the
village officers generally proceed to cut off their haqs, and occasionally are so
incensed with their proceedings as to incite the Mangs to attack them. That the
’

village officers are placed in an awkward position, cannot be denied. The slight-
est proceeding on their part, is reported as zulum and carried to the missionary to
whom the Mahars look for all sorts of benefits. Thence the complaint finds its
way to the collector. It must be borne in mind that the patel in these cases has

40
Ibid., 16 July 1893, NPR.
41
Giles to Chatfield, 15 February 1893, Ed. Dept, 1893, Vol. 58, MSA.
42
Ibid., Attachment of Weir, Assistant Collector of Surat, Administration Report 1891-92,
para. 18.
 395

little power of resistance even if in the right. The missionary is sure to believe the
words of his own converts and unless the district authorities take a different
view of the matter, the patel must go to the wa11.43

Not only did Snow’s sympathies lie with the caste Hindu village officials, but he
also had a very low opinion of Mahar character:

I have never met a more mendacious and unreliable set of men than the Christian
Mahars. No falsehood or exaggeration seems too great for them: in giving up
their own creed, they seem to relinquish at the same time all the moral restraint
which before kept them within bounds

Such negative views of untouchables were in part a consequence of educational

strategies transposed to western India from the British context. As David Newsome
has indicated, British educationalists like Thomas Arnold had fashioned widely
influential educational theories which interrelated ’good learning’ and ’godliness’.
Education (good learning) was a ’system of instruction towards moral perfection’
(godliness) of the individual, with this moral perfection defined in terms of Victorian
middle-class values.45 It was a short step for educationalists in India like Chatfield
to conceptualise the same qualities in the higher ’godly and learned’ brahman jatis.
As E.H. Gumperz and Ellen McDonald have shown, educational policy in western
India in the nineteenth century had been aimed largely at educating higher castes in
such principles in the vague hope that this education would filter down to the lower
castes and gradually reform Hindu society in the process.46 Nurullah and Naik see
the Wood Despatch of 1854 as the ’death blow’ to this failed policy of downward
educational filtration, and they envisage the Education Commission in 1882 as the
implementation of a distinct compromise for the integration of untouchable stu-
dents into the caste Hindu dominated educational and social structure .41 Events in
the 1880s, like those in Manmad and elsewhere, however, suggest that in practice
discrimination against untouchable students continued to be the rule, and ’godli-
ness and good learning’ were largely seen by colonial administrators to be the

prerogative of the higher jatis.

’British officers’, wrote Lee-Wamer, Commissioner, Southern Division, in 1887,
in comments on untouchable education, ’have, I regret to say, withstood this natural
and healthy movement’ 48 In the 1880s, Lee-Warner belonged to a minority of officials

43
Snow, 1 February 1887, Ed. Dept, 1895, Vol. 45, MSA.
44
Ibid.
45
D. Newsome, Godliness and Good Learning, London, 1961.
46
E.H. Gumperz, ’English Education and Social Change in Late Nineteenth-Century Bombay,
1858-98’, Ph.D dissertation, McGill University, 1980; E. McDonald, ’English Education and
Social Reform in Late Nineteenth-Century Bombay’, Journal of Asian Studies (hereafter JAS
),
Vol. 5, 1965-66, pp. 453-70.
47
Nurullah and Naik, History of Education, pp. 424-26.
48
Lee-Warner to East, 2 July 1887, Ed. Dept, 1895, Vol. 45, MSA.
396

holding sympathetic views towards low-caste and untouchable education. As

Acting Director of Public Instruction during Chatfield’s absence in late 1885, Lee-
Warner was subjected to a personal tirade of criticism from the Sarvajanik Sabha
and much of the Bombay Presidency press for his educational circular of 22 August
1885 limiting half of Bombay Presidency’s free studentships in high schools to the
lower jatis.49 In publicly refuting the Sarvajanik Sabha’s less than disinterested
accusations that he was actively promoting jati divisions and anti-brahmanism in
education, Lee-Wamer indicated that his purpose was merely to prevent brahman
jatis from monopolising free studentships (such as in the Deccan where 122 of 155
free studentships were held by brahman boys in 1885), and thereby establishing a
more equitable distribution of educational resources.5° In private correspondence,

however, Lee-Wamer’s sympathy for the education of the lower jatis was also
tempered with a certain raison d’etat. He wrote:

During the past twenty years we have parted with the European props which
support the roof [of British rule] .... We have turned our deputy collectors into
native officers, reduced our European inspectors and schoolmasters, and while
we have lost all these influential British subordinates, their places in the Dekhan

mostly have been filled by brahmans. The remedy is to look to the foundations
of our administration and either underpin them with European agency or (as
seems to me the best course at present) secure subordinates from the non-
brahman classes, the Marathas of the non-sacerdotal castes, the Mahomedans,
the Europeans, ’Natives of India’ and others .... If we do not loosen the power
in the administration which the Poona brahmans have acquired, we must expect
strikes and difficulties. Scholarships should be given to help the backward classes,
and we should educate the men we want for the public service .... [The brahmans’]]
caste and sacerdotal pretensions must make them opposed to British rule con-
ducted on liberal lines of freedom and equality.5’I

The ’liberal’ nature of Lee-Warner’s initiative in 1885 did, however, find much
support among the Satya Shodhak Samaj and missionary establishments.52 Rev.
Smith of the American Marathi Mission in Ahmednagar memorialised the Bombay
government on the benefits of such an educational strategy in January 1886, and
on his return, Chatfield, after stemming brahman criticism by abolishing all free

studentships in 1888, revived, in part, Lee-Warner’s policy in 1892 by reinventing

free studentships solely for the ’backward classes’.&dquo; Lee-Warner’s directive was,
however, largely of benefit to caste Hindu non-brahmans, not untouchables.
49
NPR, 26 September 1885-16 January 1886.
50
Indu Prakash, 12 October 1885; Bombay Chronicle, 18 October and 15 November 1885;
Bombay Samachar, I 1 November 1885; Indian Spectator, 15 November 1885, NPR.
51
Lamington Papers, Note by Lee-Warner, 31 October 1906, pp. 49-52, Mss Eur B159/111,
IOL.
52
Pandit, 15 January 1886; Kesari, 12 January 1886, NPR; Dnyanodaya, 14 January 1886.
53
Din Bandhu, 26 February 1888; Shetakaryancha Kaivari, 24 November 1892, NPR.
 /397

Nonetheless, by the latter part of the 1880s, sections of the Bombay Presidency
press were also beginning to advise the Bombay government that it was time to
move away from their confused and ambivalent policy on untouchable education
as embodied in the Education Commission’s directives, and to effect, if not a radical

change, at least a clear stance on untouchable education.54 Suggestions slowly

turned to open criticism from newspapers like the Indian Spectator in 1890:

It is very hard on the so-called low castes in India that though in theory they are
equally eligible with all classes of Her Majesty’s subjects for the benefits con-
ferred by a civilised government, they should be practically debarred from most
of these by being treated at school as something less than ordinary schoolboys
.... We have heard brahman friends say that the upper classes would try to meet
the requirements of the case. This offer of a compromise compares favourably
with the position of government that professes to be guided by principles of
equality, but is not. If this sneaking partiality is tolerated long enough, we should
not be surprised to hear a High Court Judge declining to do equal justice as
between a brahman and a shudra, simply because the former is pleased to look
on the latter as low-bom.55

In spite of increasing criticism, however, the ‘sneaking partiality’ continued. Indeed,

Lee-Warner’s advocacy of untouchable educational rights in the late 1880s brought
a cautious response from the Bombay government. He wrote:

As I have reason to believe that the opponents of education and of the equal

rights of man are at present active, I further recommend that government call
attention to the despatch of Her Majesty’s government and direct the collectors
of Poona, Satara and Ahmednagar to warn village officers that it is their duty to
assist and promote all efforts to educate the people, which are acknowledged by
grants-in-aid from government. 16
The Governor of Bombay, D.J.M. Reay, was quick to point out to Lee-Wamer that
he should not go around proclaiming the ‘equal rights of man’ in India. Lee-Wamer
suggested that what he had meant was ’the equal rights of all castes to education
and protection of the law’. Advocacy and promotion of untouchable educational
rights clearly perturbed the Bombay government as much as it troubled local British
administrators in western India. T.D. Mackenzie, Secretary to the Governor of
Bombay, stated the position at the end of the 1880s in words which showed little
change from similar statements by K.M. Chatfield at the beginning of the 1880s:
Given religious prejudice, it is preferable to await the effects of education, time
and the railways to remove prejudices, rather than threaten patels with penalties,

54
Indian Spectator, 10 May 1885, NPR.
55
Ibid., 30 November 1890, NPR.
56
Mackenzie to Lee-Warner, 30 July 1887, Ed. Dept, 1895, Vol. 45, MSA.
398/

if they do not actively promote Mahar education. They should be encouraged to

promote the education of all, but to force them into this will only make the
business more hateful to them .... Caste must be reduced further by railways
and education before Mr. Lee-Warner’s suggestions are implemented. 57

Il

Whereas the ambivalent practice of colonial administrators in the educational de-

velopment of untouchables in western India generally served in the 1880s to per-
petuate the educational dominance of a caste Hindu elite and the continuance of a
downward filtration theory of educational development, Scottish Presbyterian and
American Marathi missionaries in western India, on the other hand, had adopted a
policy of equal rights for all castes and communities in their schools. As the Manmad
case in 1884 indicated, missionary pressure from institutions like the Church Mis-

sion Society in Nasik was motivated by the missionaries’ wish to use their institu-
tions to educate/convert all castes of Hindus to Christianity and to prevent the
colonial government from using them simply as a place to despatch ’troublesome’
untouchable students, who, if admitted to government schools, would have emptied
them of caste Hindus.58 Nonetheless, the perceived parallels between low-caste/
untouchable bhakti beliefs and Protestant Christian doctrines had also made Prot-
estant missionaries feel that there was particular potential for conversion through
education of the lower and untouchable jatis.59 By the 1880s, the Church Mission
Society was influential in Nasik, the efforts of the Free Church of Scotland were
extensive among the untouchable communities of Pune and Bombay, the Society
for the Propagation of the Gospel was working in Ratnagiri, and American Marathi
Mission schools were promoting untouchable instruction in Bombay, Pune,
Ahmednagar and Satara. As the Assistant District Collector of Satara, Fry, com-
mented :

Low-caste boys have an excellent opportunity for education wherever any of

the schools of the American Marathi Mission are found. Among the best in this
charge are those ... in Satara taluka ... in the Wai taluka ... and in the Koregaon
taluka.6o

57
Mackenzie to Reay, 31 August 1887, Ed. Dept, 1895, Vol. 45, MSA.
58
A.J. Roberts, ’Education and Society in Bombay Presidency, 1840-58’, Ph.D dissertation,
School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 1974, pp. 178-90.
59
P. Constable, ’Early Dalit Literature and Culture in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-
Century Western India’, Modern Asian Studies (hereafter MAS ), Vol. 31 (2), May 1997, pp.
325-31.
60
Administration Report of the Satara Collectorate, Extract from Report of Fry, Assistant
Collector of Satara, Ed. Dept, 1894, Vol. 34, para, 18, MSA.
 399

The consequence of such an association between potential untouchable converts

and non-conformist Protestant missionaries was not only to render the missionar-
ies a major support for untouchable protest, but also to make them together a strong
pressure group in compelling the Bombay government into a slow reappraisal of
its attitude to untouchable education in government schools in the late nineteenth
century.
Pursuit of the educational rights of untouchable Hindus, and particularly of
untouchable Christian converts, had long been laid conspiratorially by both caste
Hindus and government administrators at the hands of missionaries from as early
as the 1850s. For example, when Jotirao Phule established his first low-caste schools
in Pune between 1848 and 1852 and placed them under a managing committee-The
Society for the Promotion of the Education of Mahars and Mangs-in 1853, it was
emphasised that he was influenced by the activities of the Free Church of Scotland
and the American Marathi Missions.61 Likewise, in July 1850, the government ver-
nacular school in Dhulia, Khandesh district, had refused to admit a Mang Christian
convert. The school board stated that if a Christian convert or a Mang or Mahar
applied for admission, they would find it difficult to vote for exclusion, but felt the
‘expediency on questions of this kind of not bringing on such discussions’. J. Bazett,
the Dhulia Court Judge, adjudicated, however, that there was no educational rule to
justify the exclusion. Bazett was known for his missionary sympathies and his
connection with the evangelical, David Davidson.62 In June 1856 another petition
was made to the Bombay government by a Christian Mahar convert who had been
refused entry to the government school at Dharwar. Missionaries were again seen
to be behind the petition. This exclusion occurred in direct contradiction of the
Wood Despatch of 1854 which, as a result of increasing missionary pressure over
low-caste and untouchable education, had prohibited the exclusion of any student
from publicly-funded schools on caste grounds. The Bombay Board of Education
stated, however, that ’it would not be right for the sake of a single individual, the
only Mahar who has ever yet come forward to beg for admission into a school
attended only by pupils of caste, to force him into association with them at the
probable risk of making the institution practically useless to the great mass of
Indians’ .63
In spite of this opposition, or at best ambivalence, of colonial administrators,
some individual instances of untouchables securing educational rights nonethe-
less began to emerge in the early 1880s as a result of untouchable and mission-
ary pressure on the government. The Educational Inspector, North-East Division,

61
Public Examination of the Poona Low-Caste Male and Female Schools, Bombay, 21 March
1853 in Roberts, ’Education and Society in Bombay Presidency’, p. 171.
62
Bazett to the Board of Education, 8 July 1856, Bombay General Proceedings, 1850, in
Roberts, ’Education and Society in Bombay Presidency’, p. 165.
63
Report of the Director of Public Instruction, 10 July 1856, Bombay General Proceedings
1856-57, MSA.
400

H.P. Jacob issued a circular in 1880 suggesting that schoolmasters admit untouch-
able students.’ In response, eight schools in Kolaba district at Dabhan, Karamsad,
Alindra, Patej and Samarkha-were boycotted by caste Hindus. At the girls’ school
at Nadiad, when two untouchable girls requested admittance, they were immedi-
ately ’excused attendance’ until further instructions could be obtained from Jacob.
The general belief in Nadiad’and Dabhan was that a conspiracy was being perpet-
rated by Presbyterian missionaries who were sending untouchable Christian con-
verts for admission to government schools. Unlike the complete exclusion of the
1860s and 1870s, however, Jacob determined that the untouchable girls in Nadiad
should be segregated on the school verandah, and if the caste Hindu students
failed to attend notwithstanding this separation, then the latter were to be excluded
from other schools. As a result of this policy, most of the schools in Kolaba district
reopened by mid-November 1880, with the exception of the deserted 200-pupil
school of Karamsad, where the parents refused to relent in their opposition to the
admission of one untouchable boy. In response, Jacob closed the school, trans-
ferred the masters and ordered that the absent students were not to be admitted to
any other school in the area.&dquo;
In the central and southern divisions, a similar compromise using the verandah
was adopted when, on 6 March 1882, Yeshwantrao Raoji Tolmatti sent a petition to
the Education Department on behalf of the high-caste Hindu residents of Dharwar
requesting the rescinding of the order admitting two Christian Mahar converts to
Dharwar high school. The Director of Public Instruction, Chatfield, replied that if
the boys were separated away from the caste Hindu children, there was no reason to
expel them, because (as explicitly emphasised in the Education Commission report),
unlike primary education where alternatives might be available, they could not
receive a secondary education elsewhere.66 In consequence, the inhabitants of Dhar-
war (like Manmad) attempted to start a private English school, although without a

government grant-in-aid the venture proved difficult to sustain.6’ Likewise in Waduth

in Satara district in 1887, the local caste Hindu schoolmaster was reported to the
government by Rev. Bruce and fined Rs 3 by the Education Department for denying
Mahar Christian converts entry to the school which was located in his own house.68
The most prominent case, however, in revealing the growing challenge that un-
touchable education with missionary support was beginning to pose to village
social structures was that of the persistent attempts by the village patel, Bapu Bin
Babaji, and the kulkarni, Ganesh Bhivrao, to close the American Marathi Mission
school in Ranjangao Ganpati (Sirur taluka, Pune district) between 1880 and 1889.69

64
Gujarati, 7 November 1880; Hitechu, 14 October 1880, NPR.
65
Duniadad, 14 September 1880; Deshi Mitra, 21 October 1880; Hitechu, 4 November 1880,
NPR.
66
Chatfield to Memoralists, 13 May 1882, Ed. Dept, 1882, Vol. 32, MSA.
67
Dharwar Vritt, 16 March 1882, NPR
; Dnyanodaya, 29 June 1882.
68
Pratod, 8 August 1887, NPR.
69
See also V. Moon, ’From Dependence to Protest: The Early Growth of Education and
Consciousness among "Untouchables" of Western India’, in B. Joshi, ed., Untouchable! Voices
of the Dalit Liberation Movement, London, 1986, pp. 18-21.
 401

Bapu Bin Babaji was appointed as patel of Ranjangao for life in 1859 on an
emolument of Rs 89 per annum.7o There had been no recorded difficulties in Ran-
jangao until the establishment by Rev. R. Winsor of the American Marathi Mission
School in the village in 1879 under the charge of two Indian teachers/catechists,
Jesuba Bhagoba and John Salar. The average attendance in the school in the 1880s
was about 16 students, most of whom were Mahars (with some Marathas), but the
school did not register for a grant-in-aid until 1886.&dquo; In October 1880, the patel of
Ranjangao, Bapu Bin Babaji, and the kulkarni, Ganesh Bhivarao, forcibly closed
down the American Marathi Mission School, and intimidated the Mahar students
and Indian missionary teachers. Although Bapu Bin Babaji and Ganesh Bhivarao
denied the charges, they were suspended from their offices as a result of a con-
tradictory statement of apology for closing the school provided by their lawyers.
After five months they were reinstated by the new Collector of Ahmednagar, Moore,
in March 1 88 1 ?2 In spite of threats of dismissal, the patel, Bapu Bin Babaji, again
forcibly closed down the American Marathi Mission School on 12 January 1887
and threatened the property and personal safety of the Mahar families, particularly
seven Mahars-Rasu and Sidu Ranu, Dhondba Dharu, Sakharam Anant, Dhondiba

Limbji, Ranu Andoba and Dhondi Rakhmaji-and their two Indian Christian teach-
ers-Jesuba Bhagoba and John Salar. Two Maratha non-brahman families ofBahadur
Kasiba and Ganpat Bapuji were also expelled from the school. 73 On complaints from
these families and their Indian missionary teachers to Rev. R. Winsor, Winsor wrote
to W.A. East, Collector of Pune, who despatched P.C.H. Snow, second Assistant
Collector of Pune, to conduct an enquiry on 1 February 1887. Snow found a situ-
ation of tension which had been simmering in Ranjangao between high-caste Hindus
and the untouchable Mahars since the patel’s dismissal and reinstatement in the
early 1880s. The patel had finally been driven by the Mahars to lose his temper and
act, in Snow’s words, ’in a most violent, headstrong and foolish manner’.’4 Snow’ss
adjudication, however, placed all the responsibility for events on the Mahars. He
felt that missionary influence had led them to affect an independence and self-
sufficiency which caused them to be insubordinate in their ordinary village duties.
As happened commonly in Ahmednagar, Snow argued, the village officers then
retaliated by withdrawing Mahar/Mang village rights, which was sufficient to incite
the Mahars and Mangs to violence against them. Although the patel, Bapu Bin
Babaji, should have complained to the mamletdar, Snow felt that his frustration
was comprehensible, especially since Mahars in general, in becoming Christian,
seemed to lose all moral restraints?5 On Snow’s advice, the Collector of Poona,

70
Proceedings before A. Keyser, Assistant Collector of Pune, 24 August 1887, Ed. Dept,
1895, Vol. 45, MSA.
71
Memorandum from Chatfield, 16 August 1887 with letter from Lee-Warner, 10 August
1887, Ed. Dept, 1895, Vol. 45, MSA.
72
Lee-Warner to Keyser, 2 July 1887, Ed. Dept, 1895, Vol. 45, MSA.
73
Winsor to East, 14 January 1887, Ed. Dept, 1895, Vol. 45, MSA.
74
Lee-Warner to East, 2 July 1887, Ed. Dept, 1895, Vol. 45, MSA.
75
Remarks by Snow, 1 February 1887. Ed. Dept, 1895, Vol. 45, MSA. Only one student was
Christian.
 402

, W.A. East. cautioned the patel, ordered the school to be reopened, dismissed
Mahar fears of violence as exaggerated, and placed the blame for events squarely
on Winsor and his Indian catechists. In particular, he cautioned Winsor and his

teachers from interfering further in village affairs between patel and village ser-
vants, and exhorted him to exercise control over his congregation.&dquo; This decision
was effectively a blow to missionary authority and, like Manmad in 1884-85, was

seen as colonial administrative recognition of the authority of the caste Hindu

villagers.
In his letter to D.J.M. Reay, Governor of Bombay, on 20 June 1887, complaining
against East’s decision, Winsor provided insight into the alternative experience of
the Mahar untouchable petitioners in Ranjangao. According to the evidence that
Winsor derived from the untouchable families, Bapu Bin Babaji had close connec-
tions with the head clerk in the collector’s office. 17 This connection had allegedly
paved the way for Bapu Bin Babaji’s rapid reinstatement as patel after five months
of suspension in March 1881, when Moore replaced Campbell as Collector of Ahmed-
nagar .78 In the illegal closure of the mission school on 12 January 1887, Winsor
alleged that the clerk had also played a facilitatory role. The patel closed the school
on 12 January 1887, presumably having been informed that when the Deputy Educa-
tional Inspector came to visit the school on 3 February, he would record its closure
and sanction the withdrawal of its recently awarded grant-in-aid.’9 The untouchable
families alleged that on the night before the Assistant Collector of Poona, P.C.H.
Snow, took evidence in Ranjangao, Bapu Bin Babaji feasted the clerk, who subse-
quently distorted the evidence taken by Snow and fabricated false charges against
the Mahars in the Collector’s office. Moreover, Bapu Bin Babaji was alleged to have
received, through the same clerk, a copy of the letter sent by the Collector of Poona,
W.A. East to Rev. Winsor on 5 February 1885, which conveyed Snow’s sentiments
that Winsor was to blame for events in Ranjangao and that he should desist from
interfering in village affairs. The untouchable families alleged that Bapu Bin Babajii
then used the letter to intimidate them further by citing his power to prevent them
from seeking assistance from the government, and encouraged them to throw out
the mission altogether.8° Snow and East seem to have been misled in their evidence
collection and conclusions, although further investigation did not produce any
evidence of collusion in their office.
As in the Manmad case, it was the Educational Inspector, Southern Division, W.
Lee-Wamer, who seemed to provide a solution to the problem by pointing out that
neither Snow nor East had evidence of or had even mentioned a specific action of
disobedience by the Mahars. The problem was essentially that education, such as

76
East to Winsor, 5 February 1887, Ed. Dept, 1895, Vol. 45, MSA.
77
Winsor to Reay, 20 June 1887; A. Crawford, Commissioner, Central Division, to Mackenzie,
30 August 1887, Ed. Dept, 1895, Vol. 45, MSA.
78
Winsor to Mackenzie, 9 August 1887, Ed. Dept, 1895, Vol. 45, MSA.
79
Winsor to Reay, 20 June 1887.
80
Winsor to Mackenzie, 4 August 1887, Ed. Dept, 1895, Vol. 45, MSA.
 403

that of the missionaries in Ranjangao, was creating a realisation among untouch-

able villagers that, in Lee-Warner’s words:

They can now sell the labour of their hands and are not bound to sit at home
and work the customary service ... without receiving the customary per-
quisites .... The system in force in many villages of compelling Mahars and
others to stay at home is a device suggested by a specious pretence of precau-
tion against crime, but is really proposed by the village officers to suppress
movement towards the emancipation of labour.11

Lee-Wamer elicited strong protest from Snow and East for his additional comments
that they should remind village officers of their duty to ’promote’ every effort to
educate all castes of students in schools assisted by the government, local boards
or grants-in-aid. Both Snow and East pointed out that they did everything possible

to encourage village officers to facilitate untouchable education, but further inves-

tigation in Satara and Ahmednagar showed the widespread nature of caste Hindu
opposition to missionary schools. Both the Collector of Ahmednagar, G. Waddington,
and Collector of Satara, G.F.M. Grant, confirmed that while open opposition by
village officers was uncommon, the widespread hindrance by village officers to
mission schools like the American Marathi Mission and to Mahar attendance, was
notoriously diffuse.82 This view seemed to be further substantiated by the activ-
ities of the caste Hindu villagers of Ranjangao after the American Marathi Mission
was reopened on 10 February 1887, its grant-in-aid renewed, and the patel, Bapu
Bin Babaji, dismissed on 31 August 1887. Between 1887 and 1889, the dispute in
Ranjangao over the American Marathi Mission school degenerated into open acts
of arbitrary violence instigated by the dismissed patel against the Mahar families
who continued to send their boys to the mission school. Rev. R. Winsor petitioned
the government on 26 and 28 August 1889 with urgent requests for the government
to intervene to prevent further injury to Mahar families and destruction of their
property by caste Hindu villagers, and the Assistant Collector, Cappell, was des-
patched to quell the violence.83 By the late 1880s and early 1890s a disregard for
caste in missionary schools like those in Ranjangao and Manmad was clearly be-
coming a cause of considerable concern among caste Hindu villagers, particularly
because of the untouchable economic mobility which it was facilitating within rural
Hindu society. Nonetheless, while missionary education and strategic support was
clearly a factor in the growing protests of the untouchable Hindus and Christian
converts in the 1880s and 1890s, the agency behind the protests arose principally,
as in Ranjangao, from untouchable Hindus and Christian converts themselves.

81
Lee-Warner to East, 2 July 1887.
82
Waddington to Mackenzie, 1 August 1887; Grant to Mackenzie, 2 August 1887, Ed. Dept,
1895, Vol. 45, MSA.
83
Letters from Winsor, 26 and 28 August 1889; Letter from Crawford, 10 October 1889, Ed.
Dept, 1889, Vol. 11, MSA.
404

III

In the early 1890s, the case of the Dapoli municipal primary school in Ratnagiri
district revealed that persistent untouchable protest, even with limited Christian
missionary support, could challenge the government’s ambivalent attitudes on
untouchable education in government schools. On 1 July 1892, a group of retired
Mahar and Chambhar non-commissioned army officers in Dapoli, led by pensioner
Subhedar-Major Ganganak Sanjanak, applied to Dapoli Municipality for the admis-
sion of their children to Dapoli municipal primary school and for the education of
their children along with caste Hindu students.8’ These untouchable Mahar and
Chambhar officers had been compelled by the British government around 1892 to
retire from the Indian Native Army in Pune where previously they and their children
had received education in regimental schools. Their older children, totalling 10
(seven Chambhar and three Mahar children), had been admitted to the local mis-
sionary high school in Dapoli, but their younger children, totalling 14 (four Chambhar
and 10 Mahar students), were without a primary school after the closure of the local
missionary primary school the previous year in 1891.85 The Society for the Propaga-
tion of the Gospel, supervised by Rev. Alfred Gadney in Dapoli, had erected a
school building in Dapoli in 1879 at a cost of Rs 5,000 and the building had been
occupied since 1882 as a school and accommodation for orphans and Indian Chris-
tian girls.86 By the mid-1880s the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel had five
schools in Dapoli, but their grants-in-aid were threatened by low attendance caused
by staff illness and unspecified ’rumours’ about the school. 17 By 1891 it is unclear
exactly how many of these missionary schools remained open, but the untouchabie
primary school students who returned to Dapoli from military stations around 1892
found themselves without access to schooling.
In response to the petition from the untouchable parents, the Dapoli municipal
council claimed, on 5 August 1892, that the Mahar and Chambhar children could
not be admitted to the municipal school since all the caste Hindu boys would
thereby have to abandon the school for religious reasons. They agreed, however,
that if the Mahar and Chambhar petitioners could collect 20 to 25 untouchable
boys, a separate class with a separate teacher would be opened for them.88 The
84
Sahasrabuddhe to Chatfield, 29 November 1894, Ed. Dept, 1895, Vol. 45, MSA. The other
pensioned officers were Subhedar Surennak Kondenak, Subhedar Jayanak Harnak, Subhedar
Sevnak Changnak, Subhedar Ramnak Deonak, Subhedar Khod Mehtar, Subhedar Ramnak Malnak
(B.R. Ambedkar’s father) and Jamadar Sapnak Hoknak. Petition to Nugent from Pensioned
Native Officers, Dapoli, 8 February 1894, Ed. Dept, 1895, Vol. 45, MSA. The Mahar population
numbered 85,513, while Chambhars-Jingars numbered 10,694 in Ratnagiri district in 1880.
Maharashtra State Gazetteers, Ratnagiri District, Bombay, 1880, p. 129.
85
Sahasrabuddhe to Chatfield, 29 November 1894.
86 Ed. Dept, 1886, Vol. 40, MSA.
87 Ed. Dept, 1885, Vol. 43, MSA.
88
Sahasrabuddhe to Chatfield, 29 November 1894; Summary of vernacular correspondence
accompanying Drew’s letter, 26 April 1894; and Drew to Sahasrabuddhe, 26 April 1894, Ed.
Dept, 1895, Vol. 45, MSA.
 405

Mahar and Chambhar officers rejected this proposal of a separate class on the
grounds that it would lead to an inferior education for their children by huddling
together different standards in one class, not to mention the emphasis that separate
education gave to their untouchability. 19 Moreover as there were only 14 untouch-
able boys, on 8 September 1892 Subhedar-Major Ganganak Sanjanak, and the
Mahar and Chambhar officers, repeated their request that the untouchable boys
be admitted to the existing municipal class.9° The municipality, however, remained
opposed on religious grounds and resolved that nothing further could be done to
admit Mahar and Chambhar children.9’ On 21 November 1892, the Mahar officers,
therefore, petitioned the Assistant Collector of Ratnagiri, and when nothing was
done, they petitioned the Collector of Ratnagiri, W.W. Drew, on 1 January 1893.
Drew wrote to the municipality asking whether the officers’ children could be lo-
cated on the verandah of the school building and receive instruction there.92 Forced
into action by the Collector, Dapoli municipality decided on 18 January 1893 that
the school building was insufficient for the present number of students and that
steps should be taken to increase the size of the verandah, place the untouchable
boys there and employ another teacher to instruct them.93 Lack of funds, however,
prevented this decision being implemented immediately. Moreover the Mahar and
Chambhar officers were asked to pay Rs 50 as their share of the price of extending
the verandah.94 The municipality then spent the next 13 months in preparing a plan
for the extension of the school verandah and in getting the approval of the munici-
pal engineer. His approval was still pending almost two years later in November
1894.95
When a further address to the Collector of Ratnagiri, W.W. Drew, in November
1893 brought no further action on the matter, the Mahar and Chambhar officers took
up the matter with J. Nugent, Commissioner of the Southern Division, when he
visited Dapoli in February 1894.96 Nugent pointed out to the Municipal President,
Vishnu Hari Barve, that the school was supported from public funds and should
therefore be open to all castes in accordance with government grant-in-aid-rules.
The municipality, however, again sought to avoid the issue by now deciding to

89
Nugent Lee-Warner, 30 June 1894, Ed. Dept, 1895, Vol. 45, MSA. The 14 primary
to
school children divided: seven in Standard III, four in Standard II, and three in Standard I.
were
90
Report of Barve, 3 April 1894, Ed. Dept, 1895, Vol. 45, MSA; Sahasrabuddhe to Chatfield,
29 November 1894; Summary of the vernacular correspondence accompanying Drew’s letter,
26 April 1894.
91
Sahasrabuddhe to Chatfield, 29 November 1894; Nugent to Drew, 2 May 1894, Ed. Dept,
1895, Vol. 45, MSA.
92
Pensioned Native Officers, Dapoli, to Nugent, 8 February 1894, Ed. Dept, 1895, Vol. 45,
MSA; Din Bandhu, 1 January 1893.
93
Sahasrabuddhe to Chatfield, 29 November 1894; Nugent to Drew, 2 May 1894.
94
Pensioned Native Officers, Dapoli, to Nugent, 8 February 1894; Report of Barve, 3 April
1892.
95
Sahasrabuddhe to Chatfield, 29 November 1894; Nugent to Drew, 2 May 1894.
96
Pensioned Native Officers, Dapoli, to Nugent, 8 February 1894; Sahasrabuddhe to Chatfield,
29 November 1894.
406

crowd the untouchable students into the original unextended verandah and ordered
the schoolmaster to educate them on the verandah according to their academic
levels.9? Although their children were therefore admitted to the school verandah on
19 February 1894, the Mahar and Chambhar officers and parents had good reason
to be dissatisfied with this arrangement as the level of the verandah wall obstructed
the students’ hearing and vision of the classroom, and the verandah was open to
sun and rain alike. Moreover, the untouchable boys were thereby separated from
their classes and huddled together on the verandah regardless of their age and
attainment. In the final analysis, this municipal compromise of ’sitting untouchable
students on the school verandah’ was as much a rejection of the parents’ wish for
the education of their children as denying them entry to the school altogether.98
In April 1894, therefore, the group of Mahar and Chambhar army officers organised
a joint meeting of the Dapoli Chambhar Mandal, and Mahar-Chambhar Anarya
Dosh Pariharak Mandal in the Chambhar quarter of Dapoli, in order to produce con-
certed action for the admission of their children to the school classroom.99 One of
the most prominent among these retired Mahar and Chambhar officers was a former
haveldar Mahar officer, Gopal Baba Valangkar. In 1888 he had been retired from the
Indian army as a result of the British government’s policy of removing untouchable
soldiers from its ranks. He returned to Dapoli where, along with other pensioned
Mahar and Chambhar officers, he established the Anarya Dosh Pariharak Mandal
in 1890.’°° Other leading members of the Mandal included Subhedar Mahadaji
Ramachandra Palavankar (secretary), Ramji Pandu Palavankar (a mukadam) and
Sambhu Krishnaji Devarukkar (a mill clerk).’°’ The united demand of the Dapoli
Mahar and Chambhar jatis that their children be admitted to government school
classrooms to receive their education like caste Hindu students was publicised in a
letter from Valangkar to the Marathi newspaper Din Bandhu on 15 April 1894.
Valangkar himself was syncretic in his social and religious outlook. Influenced
by the Kabir panth, with a knowledge of Sanskrit literature, Maharashtrian bhakti
Hinduism and Protestant Christianity, he found common ground with Christian
missionaries like Gadney, both in general religious attitudes to caste Hindu ortho-
doxy and with regard to untouchable rights to education.101 However, although
missionary connections were important in supporting the educational claims of
Dapoli Mahars and Chambars, the rationale for their actions in Dapoli came from

97
Sahasrabuddhe to Chatfield, 29 November 1894; Report of Barve, 3 April 1892.
98
Nugent to Drew, 2 May 1894.
Din Bandhu, Letter from G.B. Valangkar, 15 April 1894, p. 3.
99
Ibid., Letter from Valangkar, 20 May 1894, pp. 2-3.
100
101
Ibid., Letter from Valangkar, 15April 1894, p. 3. Other members included M.R. Savatarkar,
R.G. Palavankar, G.R. Boraghavakar and B. Boraghavakar, V.D. Abodkar, B.B. Gimonkar, V.
Devalkar and S.N. Jalgavakar.
102
Ibid., Letter from Valangkar, 7 August 1895; G.B. Valangkar, Vinanti Patra (Petition
Letter), Bombay, 1889.
 407

their knowledge of the views on education of the non-brahman reformist Jotirao

Phule.’°3 Valangkar himself was a colleague of Phule in the Satya Shodhak Samaj.
He spoke along with Phule at Satya Shodhak Samaj meetings, such as that in
honour of Maharaja Sayajirao Gaikwad in 1885, and Phule and Valangkar are re-
puted to have tested caste Hindu convictions on untouchability by seating visitors
to the Samaj in the same eating row as Valangkar
Jotirao Phule’s views on low-caste and untouchable education in western India
are portrayed graphically in his short Marathi ballad ’Brahman Teachers in the
Educational Department’. Phule’s ballad represents with perfect exactitude the events
and sentiments which were still being played out in Dapoli in the 1890s, over 20
years after it was written. The local brahmans in Phule’s ballad use their social
status and educational position in the village to prevent low-caste and untouch-
able children attending school, while convincing colonial administrators either that
they are attending or that they have no wish to be educated. Phule describes the
brahman teachers’ methods of preventing low-caste and untouchable attendance:

If children of their own caste make mistakes,

They repeat and explain, and give punishments wisely.
If other children make mistakes, they strike them with their fists.
They twist their ears sharply, and when no one is watching,
They beat the shudra children and make them run away. 101
Brahman schoolmasters and school inspectors also collaborate to mislead colonial
officials about low-caste and untouchable education and to maintain brahman privil-
eged educational and administrative status:
The master tells of their [untouchable/low-caste] qualities.
He describes them angrily. He greatly exaggerates the report.
I will tell you a little of it: ’The caste of shudras have got no sense.
They have no desire for education at all’.
This is not true. The brahmans are impostors.

103
C.B. Khairmode, Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar-Charitra (Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar-
A Biography), Vol. II, Bombay, 1968, pp. 218-21; S. Raikar, ed., Amhi Pahilele Phule (Phule As
We Saw Him), Pune, 1981, p. 37.
104
Raikar, Amhi Pahilele Phule, pp. 16-17; P.S. Patil, Mahatma Jotirao Phule Yanche Charitra
(A Biography of Mahatma Jotirao Phule), 1928, p. 137. See also R. Dhale, ’Dalit Sahitya
Purvadhar: Gopal Babanche Vinanti Patra’ (Early Dalit Literature: Gopal Baba’s Petition Letter)
in Dhammalipi, Vol. I(5), 14 April 1988, pp. 16-17; R. Daware, ’Gopal Baba Valangkar’, in R.
Daware, Mangav Parishad 62 va Smriti Mahotsav (Mangav Conference 62nd Commemorative
Celebration), Kolhapur, 1980, pp. 1-9: G. Pantavane, Vadalanche Vanshaj (The Storm-worn
Lineage), Kolhapur, 1984; R. Yadav, ’Gopal Baba Valangkar’, Siddha, Vol. XVI, 1982, pp. 78-87.
105
J. Phule, ’Brahman Teachers in the Education Department’, Satyadipika, Pune, June 1869,
p. 88 (see R. O’Hanlon, Caste Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low-Caste
Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India, Cambridge, 1985, pp. 214-50).
408/

They achieve their ends and promote the position of their own caste.
No one brings them to justice.’°6

Valangkar, in his Marathi letters to Din Bandhu on behalf of the Anarya Dosh
Pariharak Mandal, described the Dapoli school entry protest in 1893-94 in a similar
way. He saw the opposition to untouchable school entry as a tamasha or street
theatre by brahman actors under the guise of religious reasoning for the sake of
their social dominance. Valangkar pointed out that caste Hindus expressed them-
selves in public to be in favour of untouchable educational development, and he
claimed that publicly ’people shout in favour of unity, but in private they spit at this
unity’. 101 Such deception, in Valangkar’s opinion, had to be exposed by the mobil-
isation of untouchables to petition the government for their right to enter govern-
ment schools, such as in Dapoli.101 The untouchable military pensioners of the
Chambhar Mandal and Anarya Dosh Pariharak Mandal, therefore, set about put-
ting Phule’s challenge into practice as a result of the direction provided by their
own army education, Phule’s social teachings, missionary support and a trusting
belief in British policy declarations that ’the doors of learning have been thrown
wide open and anyone of any religion or jati may enter’. 109
The aim of the untouchable military pensioners in Dapoli in entering government
schools was, however, for them only a means to the greater end of furthering
untouchable social consciousness and development. In another letter to Din
Bandhu, Valangkar encouraged Mahars and Chambhars to organise their protest
activities on ’knowledge based on reading’ and ’bhakti devotion fixed on God’.IIO
In Valangkar’s opinion, education was an instrument with which to develop the
established socio-religious questioning inherent in untouchable bhakti devotional-
ism into a widening process of self-examination and awareness of exploitation
within Hindu society. Brahmans had misused their monopoly of literacy and learn-
ing to misinterpret Sanskrit scriptures in their own social interests, and to ensure
untouchable servitude by denying them the educational means to challenge brah-
manic control.III The acquisition of literacy and education, therefore, would allow
untouchable Mahars and Chambhars to challenge this subjection by developing
the critiques of their oppression already inherent in their own culture, thereby
allowing them to generate a new social consciousness. As Valangkar explained this
perspective:
From education has come the ability for people of all religions and jatis to think
about their religion. The people of every jati have established mandals in their

106
Ibid., p. 89.
107
Din Bandhu, ’Abhang’ from Valangkar, 30 September 1894.
108
Ibid., Letter from Valangkar, 6 January 1895.
109
Ibid., Letter from Valangkar, 7 April 1895.
110
Ibid., Letter from Valangkar, 31 October 1895.
111
Ibid., Letter from Valangkar, 7 April 1895.
 409

jatis and examined their customs as a result of insight gained into the obstacles
which created sorrow for human kind in the old religion. By quickly abandoning
these customs, these people have determined to behave according to a religion
based on truth and have begun work for the regeneration of their jatis. Thus we
should acquire education for people in our jatis in the backward classes who
have come to such a lowly condition, and the full strength will come to us to
question a religion which does not allow us any humanity and considers us
lower than beasts.&dquo;22

Low-caste educational improvement was, however, in Phule’s and Valangkar’s opin-

ions, hindered by the colonial theory of downward filtration of education, which
had helped to perpetuate a high-caste Hindu educational and administrative monop-
oly. Drawing on his European reading, Phule proposed:
We have heard of a philosophy more benevolent and more utopian. It is
never

proposed by men, who witness the wondrous changes brought about in the
western world, purely by the agency of popular knowledge, to redress the de-
fects of the two hundred millions of India, by giving superior education to the
superior classes and to them only .... Upon what grounds is it asserted that the
best way to advance the moral and intellectual welfare of the people is to raise
the standard of instruction among the higher classes? A glorious argument this
for aristocracy, were it only tenable?&dquo;3

The effect of such a policy, according to Phule, educated the brahmans and higher
castes to a level which gave them a virtual monopoly of state education and admin-
istrative employment.&dquo;4 By contrast it was very difficult to find a single educated
person among the Mahar, Mang and Chambhar jatis, whom the educational system
left ’wallowing in ignorance and poverty’ . ’ ’5 Valangkar and other writers in Din
Bandhu, likewise, stressed the wide inequalities created by government emphasis
&dquo;6
on high-caste education. Valangkar indicated that untouchable Mahars, Cham-
bars and Mangs had struggled to secure even the ’scrapings’ of an education, while
its ’cream’ had been bestowed on the higher castes. In spite of Queen Victoria’s
proclamation in 1858 to allocate government employment on the basis of ability not
caste or creed, even jobs suitable to these educational ’scrapings’ (such as the lower
jobs in the military, police, railway or postal service) were refused to untouchables.

112
Valangkar,Vinanti Patra, p. 20.
113
J. Phule, Gulamagiri (Slavery), Pune, 1873, p. 81, in D. Keer and S.G. Malshe, eds,
Mahatma Phule Samagra Vadmya (Mahatma Phule Collected Works), Bombay, 1969.
114
J. Phule, Memorial Addressed to the Education Commission, Pune, 1882, p. 169; idem,
Sarvajanik Satya Dharma Pustak (Book of Universal True Religion), Pune, 1891, p. 405; and
idem, Gulamagiri, p. 82, in Keer and Malshe, Mahatma Phule Samagra Vadmya.
115
Phule, Gulamagiri, p. 128; idem, Memorial Addressed to the Education Commission,
p. 169.
Din Bandhu, 6 June 1897.
116
410 /

In consequence, untouchable people were forced into exploitative menial employ-

ment in villages because of their lack of education.&dquo;’ The Educational Commis-
sioner, W. Lee-Wamer’s perception of the educational struggle in Ranjangao
between 1881 and 1889 as being one of securing or preventing the social conscious-
ness and educational means to employment mobility for untouchable villagers,
finds strong confirmation in the untouchable perspective of activists like Valang-
kar. What is more, untouchables, like those in Dapoli, perceived their failure to
advance both educationally and occupationally not simply as a result of caste dis-
crimination, but also as a consequence of ambivalent government support for un-
touchable education.
Although the Chambhar and Anarya Dosh Pariharak Mandals petitioned the
government and publicised their protest in the Marathi press, orthodox caste Hindu
objection on the Dapoli municipal board was, however, so strong that the board
persisted in its policy of using the verandah for the Mahar and Chambhar students
in the hope that the Commissioner of the Southern Division, Nugent, would acqui-
esce in the matter, ’as government in the past had rarely forced such an issue to its

implementation’.&dquo;’ Their orthodox caste Hindu perspectives prohibited literacy

and education to untouchables. Exegesis of the origins of Hindu social structure
(like the purusha sukta of the Rig Veda) bestowed by divine decree the preroga-
tives of learning, literacy and godliness on brahmans alone, who as the foremost
vama were said to have sprung from the head of the purusha sukta or primordial
man. &dquo;9 By virtue of their literacy, the brahman jatis saw themselves as interpreters
of the Hindu sacred texts and believed that their learning was necessary to give the
texts moral and religious form in daily life and practice. Moreover, their predomin-
ance in the colonial state’s educational and administrative structures was per-
ceived as a part of this brahmanic prerogative. By contrast, the low-caste shudras
and untouchables who were said to have sprung from the feet of the purusha
sukta, were excluded from literacy, learning and godliness, and designated the
degrading menial occupations of Hindu society. According to this orthodox per-
spective held by the President, Barve, and the Dapoli municipality, untouchables
who aspired to education were trying to step out of their prescribed occupational
roles and usurp high-caste Hindu social rights in social and government institu-
tions. The attempts of the untouchables in Dapoli to enter Dapoli primary school,
the violence against an untouchable school in Ranjangao, or the secession from the
missionary school in Manmad, were not merely questions of a right to an edu-
cation, but more fundamental manifestations of an emergent social conflict in
western India over social authority with its basis in the changing occupational
rights and economic mobility which education would bring.
In June 1894, Nugent finally lost patience with Barve and Dapoli municipality,
not to mention the Collector ofRatnagiri, Drew, whose ambivalence over the imple-

117
Ibid., ’Abhang’ from Valangkar, 30 September 1894; Valangkar, Vinanti Patra, p. 12.
118
Nugent to Drew, 2 May 1894.
119
Rig Veda, 10.90.12.
 411

mentation of Mahar educational rights Nugent found negligent. He recommended

to Lee-Wamer, Secretary to Government, that the Dapoli primary school grant be
withdrawn.’2° Barve retorted in his own defence that untouchable inclusion in the
municipal school had to be acquired by degrees because of the numerical prepon-
derance of high-caste Hindu boys and the danger of secession of all high-caste
students from the school as a result of the orthodox religious scruples of their
parents. He argued that, first, the students should be introduced on to the verandah,
and later to the different standards, a practice which, he claimed, had previously
been adopted in Rev. Gadney’s missionary school in Dapoli.’2’ It was pointed out
that elsewhere in Ratnagiri and the Konkan, as in the nearby school of Mandagad,
untouchable boys were taught on the verandah. Only due to the high untouchable
population were there separate schools for untouchable children at Malvan, Pen
and Panvel.I22 Having been criticised by Nugent for negligence, the Collector of
Ratnagiri, Drew, for his part supported the Dapoli Municipal President, Barve. Drew
believed that Barve had effectively ignored government orders, but at the same
time had done all that was politic under the circumstances. The question, he sug-
gested, was not whether untouchable boys should enter the school, but whether
the verandah was a suitable arrangement in the light of no other solution being
feasible. 123 When Barve was finally ordered by the Director of Public Instruction,
K.M. Chatfield, to accept the officers’ petition and include the untouchable boys
in the main classes, although separated from the other students by a few feet, the
main cause of the problem was put down to the obstruction of the caste Hindu
members of Dapoli municipality and the inaction of the Collector of Ratnagiri, Drew.
Chatfield acted more decisively in favour of untouchable student rights in Dapoli
in 1894-where there was no alternative schooling available for untouchable stu-
dents-than in Manmad in 1884-85 where separation of untouchable and caste
Hindu students into separate schools was a viable possibility. Chatfield was, how-
ever, undoubtedly aware that Drew’s acquiescence in the use of the school ver-
andah for untouchable students was a commonplace compromise by colonial
officials where implementation of untouchable educational rights was unavoidable
in the 1880s and 1890s. Indeed, where untouchable students did secure any educa-
tion in government and local board schools, ’sitting on the school verandah’
remained the general practical ’compromise’ at the local village level. Most district
officers seem to have adopted this solution and Drew was not exceptional in feeling
it to be a suitable arrangement given the alternative of caste Hindu boycott of most
schools which admitted untouchable students into the classroom itself. The Assis-
tant Collector of Satara district, Fawcett, wrote in 1893:

120
Nugent Lee-Warner, 30 June 1894.
to
121
Barve to
Drew, 13 June 1894, Ed. Dept, 1895, Vol. 45, MSA.
112
Drew to
Nugent, 26 April 1894, Ed. Dept, 1895, Vol. 45, MSA; Nugent to Drew, 2 May
1894; Doderet, Acting Collector of Ratnagiri, to Nugent, 12 June 1894, Ed. Dept, 1895, Vol. 45,
MSA. Mandagad school had 52 caste Hindu students and eight Mahar students in 1894.
123
Drew to Nugent, 2 May 1894.
412/

It is a matter of regret that so few boys of the lower castes attend these schools
and little improvement can, I think, be hoped for until some separate accommo-
dation is provided for them so that they may not be obliged to shiver outside m
the cold and rain during the monsoon as at present .... Until, however, each
school house contains a verandah or some sort of accommodation for low castes,
I fear education will not spread amongst them as quickly as can be desired. Where
there is plenty of room in the building, there is no difficulty, but it is obvious that
there are almost insuperable difficulties in the way of a Mahar or Mang boy
taking his place in a school which is so crowded that the boys sit almost touch-
ing one another.&dquo;’
Likewise, the Assistant Collector of Surat district, Weir, indicated in 1892:

The Dhed and Bhangi and Chamar children are almost entirely neglected in the
matter of education: large sums are yearly spent on providing schools and
education practically for well-born classes .... Nominally they [untouchable
students] of course can attend the schools free, but if they do come to school,
they are kept outside wet or shine. They are dirty and objectionable looking and
they therefore receive transitory snatches of attention from the master who is
probably a brahman and who is busy with a cleaner and pleasanter set of well-
born boys inside.’25

Lee-Warner’s decision in the Dapoli case challenged ’sitting untouchable students

on school verandahs’ as a valid interpretation in practice of ambivalent Education
Commission authorisation of untouchable education. In the following years, when
untouchable groups (often with missionary backing) were vocal enough to insist
on their rights to enter the schoolroom, steps were subsequently taken to ensure
these rights under Lee-Warner’s directive. Thus, in March 1895 in Khed, Ratnagiri
district, the Collector, Drew, faced an exact repetition of the Dapoli case a year
earlier, but now showed considerably more circumspection for government policy.
When the vernacular school in Khed received its annual inspection, it was found
that the untouchable class was located on the verandah, with seven of the 14
enrolled boys in attendance. Drew, therefore, requested Nugent to authorise the
same arrangement as in Dapoli, using the classroom, but with separate seating for
the untouchable students. When this policy was implemented, however, what Drew
had predicted in Dapoli immediately occurred in Khed. The caste Hindu parents
withdrew their children, leaving a few Mahar and Muslim students out of a school
register of 180 pupils. The caste Hindu parents in Khed sent petitions to Drew
requesting a return to the old system of separation on the verandah. When it
proved impossible to solve the problem by recruiting enough untouchable children
to form a separate untouchable class, B.R. Sahasrabuddhe, Educational Inspector,

124
Fawcett, Administration Report, Satara District, 1892-93, Ed. Dept, 1894, Vol. 34, para.
18, MSA.
125
Weir, Administration Report, 1891-92, Ed. Dept, 1893, Vol. 58, MSA.
 413

Southern Division, was left to negotiate the Dapoli compromise of untouchable

students seated at a distance of a few feet in their respective classrooms. 126
Likewise, at Uran, Kolaba district, in October 1895, the school committee of the
local municipality ordered that Mahar and Mang boys should be taught with other
boys in the local Marathi school, but separated by a few feet. ’2? In Alindra, Matar
taluka, Kolaba district, on 18 September 1900, a local missionary ’forcibly thrust’ 18
untouchable students into a local government school of 80 caste Hindu students.
The local inhabitants led by Dabhai Nathabhai sent a series of petitions, including
one to the Commissioner, Northern Division, on 23 September, and another with 49

signatories to the Governor of Bombay on 9 December 1902. In the petition they

indicated that the caste Hindu students had been forced to abandon the school
because of the 18 untouchable students, and requested that the untouchable pupils
be excluded and a separate school provided for them. The disingenuous reply of
the Director of Public Instruction in April 1903 was that, as there were now only 18
pupils in the school, a new school was unnecessary, but if 60 caste Hindu boys
returned to the school on the terms of the Dapoli compromise, the local missionar-
ies, who had allegedly initiated the incident, might be asked to establish a separate
school for the 18 untouchable students with a grant-in-aid from government. 1 18
It is doubtful, however, that government strategy succeeded in overcoming, to
any substantial degree, untouchable segregation on verandahs or the exclusion of
untouchable students. Like the de facto division of schools which was authorised
in Manmad in 1884, in Alindra the long-term solution was to separate the untouch-
able students into missionary schools. Even in Dapoli, where subsequent verifica-
tion of the admission of untouchable children in 1895 suggested compliance with
the government ruling, it was revealed in a further petition from Ramnak Chownak,
President of the Dapoli Anarya Dosh Pariharak Mandal in 1901, that untouchable
exclusion from primary education in Dapoli had, in practice, remained unchanged. ’29
In spite of Lee-Warner’s attempts in the 1890s, untouchable education in Bombay
Presidency between 1880 and at least 1900 was, at best, a compromise which man-
aged untouchable education and accommodated or allowed it to be determined by
the interests of the caste Hindu social order. The Bombay government did not
consistently promote ’a slow but persistent attack’ on the social and religious
prejudices of untouchability, but, on the contrary, the general ambivalence of most
colonial administrators in practice continued to allow a largely caste Hindu percep-
tion of education and social construction to dominate in late nineteenth-century
western India. The agency for the promotion of untouchable education was not by
and large the British colonial administration (although there were some notable

126
Sahasrabuddhe to Chatfield, 1 August 1895, Ed. Dept, 1895, Vol. 45, MSA; Satya Shodhak,
30 June 1895; Chandrodaya, 18 July 1895, NPR.
127
Mumbai Vaibhav, 12 October 1895, NPR.
128
Petitions from the inhabitants of Alindra, 29 April 1903, Ed. Dept, 1903, Vol. 40, MSA.
129
V.R. Kelkar, Assistant Deputy Collector-in-charge, to Drew, 14 October 1895, Ed. Dept,
1896, Vol. 52.; Petition from the Anarya Dosh Pariharak Mandal, Dapoli, 25 March 1901, Ed.
Dept, 1901, Vol. 33, MSA.
414

sympathisers like Lee-Wamer), but the untouchable communities themselves, often

with the support of missionary contacts and resources.

IV

Many accounts of educational development in late nineteenth-century India attrib-

ute the initiative behind educational change and social transformation directly or
indirectly to colonial administrative governance. Thus, S. Nurrullah and J.P. Naik,
writing at the time of Indian independence, conceptualised the colonial govern-
ment (with some assistance from missionary endeavours) as the driving force behind
Indian educational change and modemisation.110 Bruce McCully, writing a few
years earlier in the 1940s, sought to link this educational development to the growth
of Indian nationalism in a historical trajectory which stressed colonial education of
Indians in the liberal doctrines of Western thought as the motive force behind the
development of the Indian nation-state. 131 McCully’s thematic was also developed
by others. Anil Seal, in the early 1970s, stressed government education of high-
caste elites in Presidency towns as a major cause of the emergence of Indian nation-
alism, and David Kopf, in his examination of the ’Bengal renaissance’ of the early
nineteenth century, envisaged British government promotion of Oriental studies as
an early impetus in enabling Indians to know their own culture and recognise the

potential for national development in indigenous Indian terms.132 In these works

the emphasis falls primarily on the agency of the colonial administration as the
instrument or initiator of modernisation and national development through the
means of its educational institutions.
In more recent years such a linkage of education and modernisation under colo-
nial rule has, however, increasingly come under criticism, first in the work of E.H.
Gumperz and Ellen McDonald, and later in that ofGauri Viswanathan.’33 In adapting
David Newsome’s analysis of Victorian education to India, Gumperz and McDonald
have both argued that education in India was the inculcation of a code of moral
values which linked ’godliness and good learning’ in a process of self-improve-
ment and character-building as a means towards the individual’s development of
intellectual truth and moral perfection. This Amoldian educational theory of the
Victorian period was applied to Bombay Presidency by its Director of Education,
K.M. Chatfield, between 1874 and 1897 with a singular emphasis on ’moral character-
building’ of Indian elites for administrative employment, rather than (as Newsome

130
Nurullah and Naik, A History of Education in India.
131
B.T. McCully, English Education and the Origins of Indian Nationalism, Gloucester/
Massachussets, 1966.
132
A. Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism, Cambridge, 1971; D. Kopf, British
Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance, Berkeley, 1969.
133
Gumperz, ’English Education and Social Change’, pp. 297-345; McDonald, ’English
Education and Social Reform’, pp. 453-70; G. Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study
and British Rule in India, London, 1989.
 415

has indicated of Victorian Britain) the development of moral character and intellect
for the purposes of political leadership. McDonald points out, thereby, that the
result of colonial government education was to create Western-educated elites
whose perception of social development was limited to individual moral improve-
ment, rather than to spur structural socio-political change, until at least the 1920s.
Developing Gumperz’s and McDonald’s insights, Viswanathan has sought to ques-
tion the unalloyed belief of Nurrullah and Naik in the colonial ’modemising mis-
sion’ through education, and to challenge the arguments of McCully that Britain
knowingly put the educational tools of the Enlightenment into the hands of its
Indian subjects. Rather, she has argued that the humanistic ideals of the Enlighten-
ment acted as a ’mask of conquest’ to strengthen colonial cultural hegemony in
India. She sees English education, particularly English literature, as an instrument
of social control aiming to fortify colonial vulnerability in a foreign context where
direct inculcation of Western (Christian) values via the Bible (instead of Western
moral values via more secular literature) might have led to Hindu and Muslim reli-
gious protest. English literature thus became an indirect purveyor of Christian
moral principles and Western knowledge, as a means of both training the Indian
mind under the control of its platonic British guardians and shaping Indian devel-
opment to colonial purpose. Colonial education was intended primarily as a process
of social control rather than of social liberation.
However, a fundamental difficulty with all these accounts (whether they repre-
sent colonial education as liberating or repressive) is their primary focus on the
discourse of colonial policy statements (Bentinck Minute 1835, Wood Despatch
1854, and Education Commission 1882) and concomitantly their emphasis on the
colonial government as either the main driving force behind modernisation (as
suggested by Nurrullah and Naik), the enlightened but unintentional instigator of
nationalism (as proposed by McCully), or conversely as the hegemonic instrument
of social control (as argued by Viswanathan). In such an emphasis on the power of
colonial government ’policy’, there is a strong tendency to see the actualities of
educational practice in the localities solely as responses to government directive,
rather than as interactive determinants which substantially conditioned and even
dictated government educational policy. Moreover, such accounts largely neglect
the fact that it was not just in the elite colleges close to the centre of colonial
administration (which McDonald, Gumperz and Viswanathan analyse), but also,
more importantly, in villages and towns like Manmad that Indian educational devel-

opment was determined. The growing number of cases of local untouchable educa-
tional protest in the early 1880s would suggest that the 1882 Education Commission’ss
concession of low-caste education on demand within the continuing framework of
a ’downward filtration’ strategy of education, was less a strong administrative

’policy’ directive from above, than the necessary recognition of a pragmatic trend
that was already becoming established in the localities. In ratifying this pragmatic
trend of ambivalent compromise, the Education Commission in 1882 fuelled, in
turn, a further extension of ambivalent solutions (like sitting untouchable students
on school verandahs) as a result of its indecisive temporising between the policy of
416

Amoldian educationali5ts (like Chatfield) largely favouring elitist ’downward edu-

cational filtration’ strategies, and those (like Lee-Wamer) in favour of a more gen-
eral extension of education for the purposes of wider participation and concomitant
socio-political control. The Manmad case in the 1880s over the downward filtration
of English education to untouchables clearly suggests that both the classic charac-
terisations of a strong-handed colonial administration, which either succeeded (as
Nurrullah and Naik argue) in making ’a slow but persistent attack on social and
religious prejudice’, or conversely (as Viswanathan argues) in exercising hegemonic
social control over Indian society through English education, need much qualifica-
tion in the 1880s and 1890s in western India. Rather than purposive modernisation
or hegemonic control, there was ambivalence, indecisive practice/policy and incon-
clusive debate at the heart of colonial government with regard to the implementa-
tion of low-caste education in late nineteenth-century western India. It was this
temporising that allowed further consolidation of a conservative and high-caste
Hindu-dominated educational structure for Maharashtrian society, leading to
aggravated caste conflict well into the twentieth century.
Other accounts of the promotion of educational and social transformation in
nineteenth-century India have emphasised the role of Christian missionary societies.
It was particularly the work of Geoffrey Oddie, Robert Frykenberg and Duncan
Forrester which revised the view of Christian missionaries in India simply as agents
of imperial enterprise.’3a Oddie’s early work provided a broader socio-economic
narrative of missionary endeavours in which he charted the changing nature of
missionary attitudes, from outright hostility to Hindu society in the early nine-
teenth century to a more discriminating opposition to caste as a malaise of Hindu
society by the late nineteenth century. Forrester, too, examined the emergence of a
’Protestant missionary consensus’ against caste by the mid-nineteenth century
and the development of missionary education as the main instrument of this attack.
He examined missionary activities from their early beginnings with preference for
elite instruction and downward filtration of education, and charted their change to
mass conversion of low-caste Hindus and untouchables in the 1860s and 1870s.
Like Oddie, he located this mass conversion in the socio-economic context of
weakening jajmani relations in a search by low-caste labourers for new patrons and
occupations, and in famines like the Telugu Famine of 1877-78.’35 Mass conversion
was an expression of a widening social consciousness that was stimulated by social
dislocation and missionary education, and the consequent occupational change
among lower castes. It manifested itself in Christian religious form because of
obstacles to social mobility within the caste system, a lack of resources among
lower castes to establish ’horizontal’ movements for social reform, and a search for

134
Oddie, Social Protest in India; Forrester, Caste and Christianity; R.E. Frykenberg, ’Caste,
Morality and Western Religion under the Raj’, MAS, Vol. 19(2), 1985, pp. 321-52; P. Carson,
’An Imperial Dilemma: The Propagation of Christianity in Early Colonial India’, Journal of
Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 18(2), 1990, pp. 169-90.
135
On famine and conversion, see D. Kooiman, ’Mass Movement, Famine and Epidemic: A
Study in Interrelationship’, MAS, Vol. 25(2), 1991, pp. 281-301.
 417

a new egalitarian social framework and identity.&dquo;’ Thereby, in changing socio-

economic times, missionary educational attacks on caste not only stimulated un-
touchable social uplift, but also gradually gave missionaries growing influence
over state educational development in colonial India. As Frykenberg has shown

of Madras under Tweeddale’s governorship in the 1840s, missionary institutions

by the mid-nineteenth century had come to possess extensive influence on the
government regarding the spread of education in lower-caste Hindu society, the
widespread effects of which clearly challenged a downward filtration policy of
educational development. &dquo;’
The work of Robin Jeffrey, J.W. Gladstone, Dick Kooiman and Koji Kawashima
on Travancore have sought to expand and qualify further Forrester’s, Frykenberg’ss
and Oddie’s interrelation of missionary education, intellectual opposition to caste,
and socio-economic conditions for change, by examining how these factors operated
and changed over a substantial period in the socio-political interstice of a Hindu
princely state. All these above texts reveal how missionary educational initiative in
the mid-nineteenth century gave impetus to low-caste Ezhava, Pulaya and Paraya
development from inherited to achieved status, and from dependent subordination
to religious reappraisal, new socio-political consciousness and Christian conver-
sion. Like the economic improvement of parallel communities, such as the low-caste
Nadars in Tamil Nadu whom Robert Hardgraves has described as becoming me-
dium-sized traders as a result of the opportunities opened by missionary education
after 1840, the Church Missionary Society’s promotion of low-caste education in
Travancore gave communities such as the Ezhavas the opportunity to develop
trade in coconut, palm and toddy products in the more liberal economy after the
1860s. &dquo;I Likewise, London Missionary Society education allowed low-caste Nadars/
Shanars and untouchable Parayas to secure employment as clerks and kanganies
(labour supervisors) in the coffee plantations of Ceylon (1830-70) and Travancore
(after 1870).’39 This economic improvement, in turn, led to missionary-initiated chal-
lenges to social restrictions such as the relaxation of dress restrictions on low-caste
women after the breast-cloth protests in the 1850s, the formal abolition of Pulaya

136
See also G.A. Oddie, ’Christian Conversion in the Telugu Country, 1860-1900: A Case
Study of One Protestant Movement in the Godavery-Krishna Delta’, Indian Economic and
Social History Review, Vol. 7(1), 1975, pp. 61-79; and idem, ’The Depressed Classes and
Christianity’, in idem, Hindu and Christian in South-east India, London, 1991, pp. 153-69;
K.A. Ballhatchet, Caste, Class and Catholicism in India 1789-1914, London, 1998.
137
R.E. Frykenberg, ’Modem Education in South India, 1784-1854: Its Roots and Role as a
Vehicle of Integration under Company Raj’, American Historical Review, Vol. 91(1), February
1986, pp. 37-65. For a theory of upward percolation of education, see G.A. Oddie, ’Christian
Conversion among Non-Brahmans in Andhra Pradesh with Special Reference to the Anglican
Missions and the Domakal Diocese, circa 1900-36’ in G.A. Oddie, ed., Religion in South Asia,
Delhi, 1977, pp. 67-99.
138
R. Hardgraves, The Nadars of Tamilnad, Berkeley, 1969.
139
Kooiman, Conversion and Social Equality, pp. 104-9, 127-35; K.K.N. Kurup, ’The
Colonial Investment and Abolition of Slavery’, Journal of Kerala Studies, Vol. XI(1-4), 1984,
pp. 187-99.
418

and Paraya slavery (1855), the legal removal of forced labour (1860), and a legal end
to distance pollution on untouchables in public buildings and on roads ( 1870).’4° In
the context of this social emancipation, stimulated by missionary education and the
commercialising economy of Travancore after 1860, Jeffrey has argued that ’mili-
tant missionary’ educational endeavours were the direct driving force behind low-
caste and untouchable improvement and an indirect impetus, thereby, in the
modemisation of Travancore’s social and governmental structures under the guid-
ance of the dewan, Madhava Rao ( 1857-72, 1887-91 ).’4’ Gladstone also corrobo-
rates this view of the ’militant missionary’. He argues that it was the social radicalism
of missionary ideals and practice which led low-caste communities to a new spiri-
tual and temporal emancipation either in Christian terms, or alternatively in Hindu
terms such as the Shri Narayana Guru movement of the Ezhavas, and the Pulaya
movement of Ayyan Kali. In spite of caste factionalism by which nineteenth-century
missionary churches were riven, the ideals of the Christian gospel and their inculca-
tion through missionary education provided spiritual renewal and material emanci-
pation for Christian converts and low-caste Hindus.’42 In sum it is argued that it was
Protestant Christian missionaries, rather than government, who were the primary
agents of low-caste and untouchable educational development and social change.
In more recent years there has, however, been important qualification of the
alleged militancy of this missionary role. Kawashima, for example, has indicated of
the missionaries in Travancore that, as the Madras government’s authorities moved
from a policy of a ’civilising’ and ’modemising’ mission in Travancore in the 1860s
and 1870s to non-interference by the 1890s, Travancore became more socially con-
servative, forcing missionaries into greater co-operation and deference to state
authorities in the absence of support from the colonial government in Madras.
While missionary educational and medical institutions were important to the
Travancore government and could not be jeopardised, Travancore state tried to
limit the conversional implications of these institutions. The socio-econo mic effects
of missionary education in betterment of low-caste and untouchable communities
and the growing reality of Christian conversion among Nadars, Pulayas and Parayas
(or the threat of conversion among Ezhavas), led the Hindu Travancore govern-
ment (with its roots in high-caste brahman and caste Hindu Nair land-owning inter-
ests) to initiate measures to curb missionary educational influence in the 1880s
(such as restrictions on grants-in-aid for missionary schools, state curriculum con-
trol, inspection of teachers and prohibition of religious instruction).’43 Moreover,
missionaries were increasingly expected to exact obedience from and control their
low-caste converts within the framework of an essentially conservative state social

140
R. The Decline of Nair Dominance: Society and Politics in Travancore 1847-1908,
Jeffrey,
Delhi, 1976; Kawashima, Missionaries and a Hindu State, Delhi, 1998; Kooiman, Conversion
K.
and Social Equality; J.W. Gladstone, Protestant Christianity and People’s Movement in Kerala,
Trivandrum, 1984.
141
Jeffrey, The Decline of Nair Dominance, pp. 34-62.
142
Gladstone, Protestant Christianity and People’s Movement in Kerala.
143
Kawashima, Missionaries and a Hindu State, pp. 77-79, 103-10.
 419

hierarchy. ~&dquo; As Kooiman also stresses, the London Missionary Society’s inculca-
tion of Christian codes of moral obedience, missionary respect for civil authorities
and the distancing of converts caused by a missionary sense of racial paternalism,
led both plantation owners and landlords by the 1890s to come to see missionaries
as a means of social control over their Christian labourers, rather than simply as

agents provocateurs. 145

Such suggestions that missionary militancy was more limited in practice than
hitherto believed, are also reflected to some degree in western India in the 1880s in
cases like that of Manmad and Ranjangao. Just as the Madras government’s ’non-
interference’ in Travancore in the 1880s and 1890s led to increasing social conser-
vatism and limitations on missionary activities, so the Bombay government’s alleged
claims of ’religious neutrality’ in the 1880s in Manmad favoured conservative caste
Hindu interests and created ambivalence over untouchable educational develop-
ment which impacted adversely on missionary educational activities. Rev. Main-
waring and Squire held tenaciously for untouchable and Church Missionary Society
educational rights in Manmad, but in practice they were ultimately driven to com-
promise (in ways not dissimilar to Kawashima’s study of Travancore) with the force
of wider societal objections to their activities, with state administrative conser-
vatism in the form of the ’downward educational filtration theory’, and even with
the bitter pill of government sanction of caste Hindu conscientious objection to
Christian religious tuition. Moreover, as in Kawashima’s and Kooiman’s descrip-
tions of the Travancore government in the 1880s and 1890s, there was an expec-
tation on the part of the Bombay government that the missionaries in their Presidency
would ensure suitable conduct of their congregations so as not to undermine rural
social and occupational structures. Rev. Winsor of the American Marathi Mission
in Ranjangao was strongly reprimanded for his lack of control over his catechists
and Christian converts, in spite of government recognition of the culpability of the
patel, Bapu Bin Babaji. Missionary education was doubtlessly an element in un-
touchable economic change and social mobility, but it was not simply a militant
emancipatory force which operated without limitations or beyond the restraints of
government and Indian society more generally.
In her study of the interrelationship of Muslim, Hindu and Christian patterns of
belief in south India, Susan Bayly has sought to de-centre even further the role of
(Roman Catholic) missionaries as the main agents in the development of Indian
Christian identity. In particular, she gives emphasis to the manner in which Indians
adapted the doctrines of Western Christianity to their own purposes, how they
‘captured’ the authority of missionaries to enhance indigenous forms of social and
political organisation, and how they created strategies of resistance by which to
incorporate and dominate the impact of colonial (missionary) forms. In emphasising

144
Ibid., pp. 164-5.
145
Kooiman, Conversion and Social Equality, pp. 44, 142-43, 202; see also N. Pandit, ’Caste
and Class in Maharashtra’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XIV(7), 1979, p. 429; Oddie,
Social Protest in India, pp. 6, 17; Forrester, Caste and Christianity, pp. 23-25.
 420

this incorporation, rather than the transcendence of colonial forms (like Christian-
ity), Bayly argues for a syncretic process of mixing, borrowing and overlap of
religious forms which exhibited not the diffusion of egalitarian ideologies attributed
to missionaries by the interpretations of Forrester, Oddie and others, but the continu-
ity and predominance of an evolving indigenous social order and Indian social
agents whose Christian beliefs continued to reflect perceptions of caste, rank,
honours and ceremonial status shared throughout wider south Indian society.
Christian identification was therefore not a product of social egalitarianism, but an
assertion of a ’Christian’ caste identity as a means of pursuing indigenous conflicts
over ’rank’ and ’honours’. As Bayly expresses it: ’no one involved in [these]
conflicts ... had any intention of liberating himself from the supposed constraints
and disabilities of the Hindu caste system. In these conflicts religious conversion
was simply one more means by which a group could seek to gain new honours
within an established and increasingly stratified scheme of rank and precedence.’ 146
Although Kooiman differs in degree from Bayly in seeing the missionary role as
’limited’ rather than (as Bayly) largely ’determined’ by the Indian context, he too
conceptualises missionary education as a force for low-caste social change in
terms of Indian forms of social mobility, rather than in terms of more radical non-
indigenous agendas for structural social change. He argues that the enhanced
economic benefits which missionary education brought to some low castes like the
Ezhavas, often led to attempts to Sanskritise their customs and beliefs in order to
,
rise in the Hindu caste hierarchy. Other lower castes like Pulayas and Parayas,
whose social improvement within Hinduism was impeded by higher caste Nairs or
even Ezhavas, turned, as a result of missionary education, to Christianity as an

alternative means of socio-economic mobility. Missionary education thereby acti-

vated parallel processes of social development by Sanskritisation and Christianisa-
tion in different low-caste/untouchable communities, but both these processes led
to adaptation to the customs and rituals of Great Traditions with the aim of social
mobility and advancement, rather than to radical egalitarian challenges for struc-
tural social change. Likewise, Henriette Bugge has sought to elaborate the contex-
tual determination of missionaries by rural economic structures in her study of the
Protestant Danish Mission and Roman Catholic Missions Etrang6res de Paris in
South Arcot, Tamil Nadu in the late nineteenth century. 147 She argues that there is
no clear suggestion that untouchable labourers became Christian because they
wanted missionaries to emancipate them from the caste system, or that they con-
verted from an awareness of the social justice of Western liberal ideals, or even that
they were seeking greater social mobility within Christianity as compared to Hindu-
ism. Rather, mass conversion in the late nineteenth century was encouraged by a
period of economic change in patterns of rural domination enabling untouchable
labourers to change old (Hindu land-owning) masters for new (Christian mission-

146
Bayly, Saints, Goddesses and Kings, p. 447.
147
Bugge, Mission and Tamil Society, London, 1994; see also D.D. Hudson, Protestant Origins
in India: Tamil Evangelical Christians 1706-1835, London, 1999.
 421

ary) masters for better material treatment and benefits (such as education) which
the latter might bring. Conversion was thereby more a means of establishing new
economic bonds of dependency and allegiance than the egalitarian religious move-
ments under missionary direction which Forrester, Oddie or Jeffrey have described.
Christianisation might be better described as an indigenous movement, paralleling
Sanskritisation among low-caste groups within the Hindu caste hierarchy. Thus, it
is argued that missionary activities were not only ’limited’ (as Kawashima and to
some extent Kooiman suggest), but (according to Bayly and Bugge) were actually
‘subsumed’ into and ’determined’ by the indigenous ritual and social perceptions
of their congregations and the wider Indian society in which they were imbricated.
It is apparent in western India (as Bayly and Bugge suggest of south India) that
missionary activities were not only ’limited’ by the wider society, but ’determined’
to a large degree by the indigenous socio-cultural practices of the Indian groups
which they sought to convert. On the one hand, certain of these syncretic Christian-
Hindu groups may be described as utilising missionary education and Christianis-
ation (in place of Sanskritisation) with the aim of social mobility within the caste
structure, but on the other hand there were also simultaneously other syncretic
Hindu-Christian groups (like the Dapoli Anarya Dosh Pariharak Mandal) which
sought to use missionary education and syncretise Christian missionary values
with their increasingly radicalised untouchable culture in the pursuit of a more
extreme ideological attack on the caste structure itself and on the untouchability
that it authorised. Drawing on Christian missionary support in terms of material
patronage (often given with the aim of conversion) and often with a misplaced faith
in the assistance of colonial officials, local untouchable organisations like the Anarya
Dosh Pariharak Mandal led the drive for education and school entry protest on the
basis of an indigenous but radical ideology that was formed by the syncretic incor-
poration into untouchable bhakti culture of missionary socio-religious ideals and
selected ideas from the low-caste Hindu radical Jotirao Phule and the Satya Shodhak
Samaj.I48 In particular, the activities of Phule and the Satya Shodhak Samaj before
1890 helped groups like the Anarya Dosh Pariharak Mandal to sharpen their critical
understanding of what Valangkar perceived to be a socio-religious tamasha or-
chestrated by higher-caste Hindus with the aim of securing high-caste dominance
over Hindu society. Likewise, in their syncretic incorporation and re-moulding of
Amoldian educational concepts within untouchable culture, education was seen
as a means of further developing the introspection and self-questioning already
inherent in indigenous untouchable bhakti Hindu culture for the generation of a
heightened self-awareness among untouchables of their exploitation in Hindu soci-
ety, and for the pursuit of their opportunities for social and economic development.
Education was a means, as Valangkar explained, not only to greater individual
‘godliness and good learning’ (as McDonald and Gumperz argue was characteristic
of caste Hindu elites), but also to wider social awareness, economic improvement

148
For Protestant Christian missionary influence on Phule, see O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and
Ideology, pp. 105-32.
422

and occupational mobility, all of which allowed untouchables to challenge their

caste exploitation in structural terms. Bayly and Bugge, however, seem to neglect
this syncretic incorporation of colonial-missionary values and practices by radical-
ising untouchable cultures, and, thereby, marginalise the dynamism created in
Indian society by radical untouchable ideologies for structural social transform-
ation.
In the final analysis, it was not therefore the ambivalent educational policy of a
colonial administration, or the often supportive but socially imbricated activities of
Christian missionaries, but a radical indigenous ideology/practice of untouchable
educational protest that provided the agency and dynamic for untouchable educa-
tional development and cultural identity re-formation in late nineteenth-century
western India. Moreover, just as socio-religious syncretism provided the dynamism
of change in the less bounded socio-religious communities of pre-colonial India,
so continuation of this syncretic identity under British colonialism among those

perceived to be at the social margins like untouchables, provided a dynamic not

just for socio-economic mobility within existing social structures, but also for
wider social challenge to the increasingly bounded community structures of late
nineteenth-century western India. It was the practical expression of this untouch-
able syncretism in educational endeavour (as in untouchable religious and military
protest) which provided one of the most radical impulses for social change in late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century western India. 149 The question of ’sitting
on the school verandah’ was not merely one of access across educational and

occupational thresholds to better social ranking, but was in many cases-like that
of the Anarya Dosh Pariharak Mandal-a syncretically dynamic and ideologically
driven indigenous protest against the caste structure itself and the untouchable
discrimination it perpetuated.

149
P. Constable, ’Early Dalit Literature and Culture’, pp. 317-38; and ’The Marginalisation of
a Dalit Martial Race in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Western India’, JAS,
2001 (forthcoming).