Marking the 96th Anniversary of Dr. Ambedkar’s March for the Right of ‘Untouchables’ to Drink Water in Public Places
- My family’s relationship with water is marred by the indignities that previous generations experienced, but also shaped by resilience and resistance.
Jai Bhim, Jai Jyoti Savitri, Hul Johar Satrangi, Salam, to each of you. I greet you all with these anti-caste salutations because these are the ways in which anti-caste communities collectively commemorate their histories of resistance.
This month, I just hosted an audio story, “The Subverse” with “Dark ‘n’ Light” on the history of the Mahad Satyagraha, and I would love for you to listen to this episode, which explores water and caste in India.
It was nearly 100 years ago, in March, that thousands of people marched to Mahad—a town in the erstwhile Bombay presidency—to exercise their rights. Led by the anti-caste leader and statesman, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the Satyagraha that took place on March 20, 1927, was to assert the rights of so-called ‘untouchables’ to drink water in public spaces.
Stories of the Mahad Satyagraha were told and retold in our Ambedkarite household. Our family elders would tell us that this struggle was for dignity as much as it was for water. And that we were not even afforded the decency that animals were given. Thus, this was also a fight to claim our humanity.
My father remembers that as a child, upper-caste women in his village, who were collecting water at a nearby stream, hurled abuses at him when he approached the water.
My father remembers that as a child, upper-caste women in his village, who were collecting water at a nearby stream, hurled abuses at him when he approached the water. He was sent off, calling him ‘maharachya porane pani batavale’ (the son of mahar defiled the water). This was nearly three decades after Mahad.
My grandfather told us a story of his transformation. As a young boy, he followed a caste tradition called potraj, through which he dedicated himself to the goddess Mari aai — carrying a small temple of the goddess on his head. Wearing long, colorful garb with long, matted and coiled hair (it was believed that the goddess resides in them), he begged for alms. He would whiplash himself as a show of loyalty and penance to the goddess. (The potraj caste tradition is followed by a few oppressed castes and nomadic tribe communities in Maharashtra.)
But when he heard about Dr. Ambedkar’s march for dignity, he walked to Mahad all the way from his remote village in Satara, and while he did that, he pulled off each strand of his long matted hair as an act of renouncing the caste traditions that kept him enslaved. This story, for me, is about resistance.
The everyday acts of marginalized community members, standing for their rights as equal citizens, are acts of resistance. Well into the early 2000s, our laborers’ colony did not have water access for every household; a colony of 56 houses made do with water from three taps, with limited and odd hours.
My parents woke up at three in the morning to queue for water. Every monsoon, our houses were flooded with water from open drains that would burst open or clog. My mother went to the local councilor’s office to ensure that we had access to basic amenities, and that too is resistance.
My family’s relationship with water is marred by the indignities that previous generations experienced, but also shaped by resilience and resistance. Water purifies, so my father washed his hands nearly compulsively, almost ritualistically, as though to peel away the indignities we faced. My parents made sure that we kids were washed and neat every day. They took great care to wash the premises around our house with water, as though enough of it could rid us of the stigma of impurity, caste, and poverty.
This audio story has been a spiritual journey, a meditative walk for me, as I reflected on my own history.
Swati Kamble is an anti-caste intersectional feminist researcher-activist. Her research broadly focuses on human rights and social justice movements, decolonization, and intersectionality. She has a Ph.D. in socio-economics from the University of Geneva. Her doctoral research focused on the political mobilization of India’s caste-affected, caste-oppressed communities, their movement history, and how this movement has shaped oppressed caste women activists into agents of change. She studied how Dalit women activists influence policy processes by negotiating and navigating andro-centric, upper-caste bureaucratic spaces of power. Additionally, she has studied Roma women’s movement in Hungary and how the European decade for Roma inclusion plan’ policy did not reflect the issues of Roma women that the Roma civil society has been advocating for. Currently, she is researching the digital activism of Dalit women and middle-class Dalit women’s mobility in the Indian neo-liberal market.