The Indian subcontinent was colonized externally by the East India Company around the mid-eighteenth century. Before the beginning of the foreign colonizing rule, for millennia Indians were internally colonized by their own through the social hierarchy of the caste system. It has been argued beyond doubt that European modernity was introduced in India by the colonizers in the form of new legal systems, education and infrastructure.
The presentation will explore how, in the nineteenth century, Protestant Indian Christians from the marginalized communities challenged the caste system that denied them social independence. The Colonial judiciary in the Bombay Presidency become the site of this confrontation between modernity and traditional values. In this largely unexplored site of colonial judiciary, the talk will explain how Indian Christians asserted their rights by using the writ petition of Habeas Corpus to reclaim their individual liberty and social rights. Paul D. Halliday’s book Habeas Corpus from Empire to Nation argues that “throughout history the central purpose of habeas corpus has been to provide the means by which the judge might find the place at which liberty and physical security could be protected simultaneously by ensuring that subjects were imprisoned only according to law” (p.8). The writ of habeas corpus is described as the “the protector of liberties of the subject.” (p.303). Halliday gives examples of how the writ was to used not only to release prisoners of the Crown, but also used to litigate civil disputes: wives unlawfully imprisoned by their husbands; patient detained as lunatics; a parishioners imprisoned for laughing in church. Following some promising inspiration, I will examine two petitions filed by the Indian Christians in the Bombay Presidency. The central focus of the talk is not to examine the writs, but rather to explore the life stories of the people behind the writ petitions.
In the first case, the Indian Christians challenged the restriction imposed on drawing water from public wells. Untouchables i.e. Dalits were not allowed to draw water from wells for the fear of the well getting polluted. Indian Christians from the marginal communities challenged the restriction on drawing water by a petition and the case came to be known as ‘water trouble.’ The magistrate ruled in favor of the Indian Christians’ rights, as the official documents comments “The Mahars and the Mangs, though much looked down upon, are allowed to draw water from the public wells, a privilege which is refused to Hindu Mahars and Mangs”(Gazettee of 1881). The ruling had a broader significance, as it alluded to an individual’s right to conversion. Religious conversion gave Dalits liberty and upward social mobility that allowed them to subvert the caste system. In another incident, through the writ of petition, two Mang (Dalit) girls studying in a missionary hostel appealed to the judiciary to uphold the ‘Conscious Clause’ against their parents who wanted them to abandon their studies and be bride children to a Kandooba diety. Both the girls won their case and they were allowed to remain in the missionary hostel to pursue their studies. The case is to be seen in the context of Indian nationalist opposition to girls’ education, citing ‘loss of nationality.’ Both cases highlights not adhering to caste rules means a loss of nationality itself.
I will be using this microhistory of stories of individual political and social freedom to see the bigger or macro connections to the different phases of the India nationalist movement towards Independence. The initial Nationalist movement in the late nineteenth century that sprung up in Bombay Presidency under the leadership of Bal Gangadar Tilak, a Brahmin who advocated freedom from colonial rule.[i] Tilak coined the term Swaraj and defined it as a ‘self-rule’ towards political independence. He used the term swaraj to exploit its traditional overtones, of a Hindu Rashthra i.e a Hindu nation. The end goal was narrow: independence of India from foreign rule. On the other hand, the life stories of the Indian Christians and the non-Christian Dalits helps us to understand contested ideas of freedom, and how marginal and nationalist concepts of freedom differ. For the marginal community, it was a struggle for freedom against one’s neighbour, especially caste Hindus, who ruthlessly dominated Dalits as a matter of routine oppression at local water wells and temple worship. The freedom they were articulating was freedom from social tyranny of the Brahmanical ideology, which had a broader understanding of individual liberty that seeped down to the most marginalized community and also included gender equality in its notion. On the other hand, the national movement led by the elites under the banner of swaraj was synonymous with the Western idea of political independence, which did not threatened the status quo of the traditional Indian hierarchical system of caste.
The presentation will briefly challenge the concept of decolonization which world over is seen as an attack on the colonial legacy.[ii] From the perspective of Indian marginal communities in their quest for freedom, we see them allying and using the colonial instruments like the judiciary and English education to gain freedom from their everyday oppressors, enslavers and colonisers. Hindutva forces that are threatening the Indian Democracy now wants it to be a religious autocratic state in which the rights and the freedom of religious expression of the minorities and the marginal communities are to be curtailed. Indian Christians need to look into their past to re-imagine and re articulate their ideas of freedom to protect social Democracy.
[i] Mahata Gandhi articulated Hind Swaraj, which had a much broader understanding and it included liberty equality and fraternity in this concepts. Gandhi never excepted Tilak’s narrow idea of Independence.
[ii] Black Lives Movement and decolonisation movements in the US and UK have targeted statues of colonial slave traders that marked the colonial legacy. Protestors have dumped those statues in rivers.
This presentation will examine the contested ideas of freedom evident in the two writs of habeas corpus, filed in the Bombay Presidency by Indian Christians in the nineteenth century, challenging the Indian caste system. The writ of habeas corpus, described as the ‘protector of liberties of the subject,’ was used by the English judges to protect the King’s subject across the British colonies. Through the writ Indian Christians from the marginal communities were claiming freedom from one’s neighbour, who ruthlessly oppressed them.
Using this micro history of individual political and social freedom, this presentation will examine the macro connections with the Indian nationalist movement. Nationalist advocated Swaraj that had a narrow vision of political independence from foreign rule. Contested ideas of freedom is about how marginal community wanted freedom from the internal colonization and marginalization of the upper class in line with how the elites fought for freedom from external forces.