Compare the nature of social discrimination practised in South India and Western India

The nature of discrimination differed from region to region in the early years of the 19th century. In large parts of the Madras Presidency the bulk of the agricultural labourers belonging to low caste groups were said to have been reduced virtually to conditions of slavery.

The Madras Presidency was divided in three major areas. Of these, the Telugu region was relatively free from bondage system. But in the Tamil country especially in the wet districts and in the Malabar and Kanara region, a large portion of the laboring class lived in a state of bondage. In districts like Chingleput and Tanjore, the condition of the untouchable’s castes called Pallans or Paraiyans was really deplorable.

Here the old Hindu institutions were reinforced by the British legal system giving a fresh lease of life to power and influence of certain higher castes.

There was a group of Brahman landowners forbidden most types of manual labour by the rules of their caste who were letting their lands to tenants or employing hired labourers to do the task they could not do themselves.

In Malabar the Cherumans, corresponding to the Paraiyans in Tamilnadu, were almost exclusively treated as slaves. Buchanan, in course of his travels in early years of the 19th century, found that in Palghat by far the greater parts of the work in the fields was performed by Cheruman slaves.

They could be sold, mortgaged and rented out. From Malabar Buchanan moved to Kanara where he found an equally harrowing situation. Men of low caste occasionally sold their younger relations into slavery in discharge of debts. In short, available evidences on South India suggest that agrarian bondage was quite widespread in the early years of the 19th century.

Case-studies of some select subordinate groups outside the agrarian sectors show the same process of social discrimination at work. A recent survey of the Nadars of Tamilnadu demonstrates that in the early 19th century they were counted among the most oppressed caste. They were economically differentiated between higher ranking Nadars and lowly Shiners or toddy- tappers. Various disabilities were heaped upon the Shanars.

They were, of course, forbidden entry into temples. Wells were strictly forbidden to their tisi they were denied the right to carry an umbrella, to wear shoes, golden ornaments, to milk cows, to walk in certain streets and their women were forbidden to cover their breasts. Indeed, a Nadar could not even approach a prahmin within twenty-four paces.

A few Shanar families, who settled as minorities in areas north of Tirunelveli, confronted even more humiliating conditions. They were even denied the service of barbers and washer men used by the caste Hindu of the villages. Gradually, among the main body of Shanars emerged a mobile body of traders who traded country liquor and jaggery sugar.

When the Poligar Wars ended in 1801 both the trading and toddy-tapping Shanars moved on northwards to the Maravar country and settled in ‘Six Nadar Towns of Ramnad’. But the locally dominant castes of the region, the Maravars, Tevars and Kallars associated them with the lowly, polluted, toddy-tapping Shanars.

It is not surprising that the Nadars constituted a fertile ground for conversion to Christianity. They would be in the forefront of the later day anti-Brahman movement in the region. Further the western coastline of India there was another striking instance of institutionalised social discrimination in South Gujarat.

Recorded in the early 19th century British records as Halipratha, it was a formalised system of lifelong and often hereditary attachment of the low-caste Publas to the Anavil Brahmans who owned the best and the largest lots of land. In some regions the attached farm servants also included a section of Kolis called gulam Kolis.

The condition of service was not contractual. It usually began when an agricultural labourer wished to marry and found a master ready to pay for it. The debt thus incurred attached the servant to the master for life. It increased in the course of years thereby rendering repayment virtually impossible.

The Halis were not sold though their service could be transferred to another master. The ritual domination of the high caste Brahmans over low caste Dublas was consolidated in an exploitative relationship of an all-encompassing nature. The master had the right to the labour of the servant and his wife as maid in the household.

In Maharashtra the idioms of dominance and discrimination were no less pronounced. In 18th century Maratha kingdom, Brahmanical dominance was backed up by the state power of the Peshwas. There was a strong connection between Maratha polity and caste system through the regular requisition of forced labour from artisans and menial castes by the authorities.

In the directly administered regions of the 18th century Maratha kingdom, the state took an active role in maintaining and enforcing ritual and economic aspects of caste society. In 1784 the government formulated rules of worship at the holy places of Pandharpur which explicitly stated that the untouchables were not allowed to go near their own shrine. The Mahars of the Konkan region demanded some Brahman priests of the place to officiate their marriage ceremony.

Despite the support from the local officials this demand was turned down with a heavy hand. The state offered the untouchables to have their marriage officiated by their own priests and warned, “If they trouble the Brahmin priests in future, no good result will come out.” In other words, the Maratha state power mediated caste relationship in the region and ensured the Brahmanical hegemony in society. Baji Rao II, himself a Chitpavan Brahman, distributed generous sums of money to large number of Brahman scholars in Pune, to enable them to devote their time to religious scholarship.

When the Company took over the administration after the fall of the Marathas, the state’s active support of the Hindu religious values was withdrawn. This, of course, did not immediately signify any major change in the condition of the lower castes.

As the Company’s administration engrafted itself on the Indian society, it depended on Indian subordinates at the lower levels. The upper castes, in view of their earlier access to educational opportunities, gained a strategic mediatory position between the Company’s government and the larger masses of western Indian society.

This effectively buttressed their already dominant position in society. But the relatively stagnant position of the lower castes and untouchables made them fertile grounds for missionary propagation. In western India in the 19th century the missionaries did their utmost to persuade their audiences that the Hindu religion had deprived them, as shudras, of their real rights in matters of education and religion.

There was a preponderance of higher castes in general and Brahmans in particular in administration, far in excess of their numerical proportions in the population as a whole. “Far from breaking down inequalities in western Indian society, British rule looked as though it might reinforce them by adding to the older religious authority of Brahmans, a formidable new range of administrative and political powers.”

Critical observers like Jotirao Phule and his followers drew the natural inference that a rejection of the religious authority of the Brahmans and of the hierarchical values, on which it was based, formed the precondition for any real change in their condition.