Using History to Create a Dalit Identity

According to Phule, the most important stories of popular Hindu mythology were actually the distorted reflections of the ancient struggle between the Brahmans, who originally came from some region beyond the river Indus, and the Kshatriyas, the original inhabitants of this land, who came to be called kshatriyas by the invaders because they lived in ‘kshetras’ or fields. Phule explained how the mythological accounts of the ten incarnations of Vishnu and Parshuram’s extirpation of the kshatriyas from the earth were deliberately distorted versions of the actual historical conquest and defeat of the natives. Phule devotes the first nine chapters of Slavery to reconstructing the past and reinterpreting the 10 incarnations of Vishnu in historical terms (Phadke, 1979).

According to Phule, the Aryans first attacked in small boats that moved in water like fish or ‘masa’ and hence the nickname of the first Aryan leader to attack the Kshatriyas came to be ‘Matsya’ (the first incarnation of Vishnu). Brahman writers distorted this historical event in the Bhagwat Parana to say that Lord Vishnu emerged from a fish. The second time the Aryans attacked, they came in larger boats which were slpw moving and resembled the tortoise in movement. This event was distorted in the Bhagwat Purana as the second incarnation of Vishnu. The Purana describes Vishnu as emerging from a tortoise to recover things of value lost in the deluge. And in this way Phule goes on to give his unique explanation of the third, fourth and fifth incarnations of Vishnu as the boar Varah, as the man-lion Narasinha, and the dwarf Vaman, respectively. Varah, Narasinha and Vaman were incarnations, Vishnu took in order to deliver the world from the tyranny of the Daitya or demon kings who were historically the defeated Kshatriya rwiers.

Then breaking with the conventional Hindu accounts of the incarnations, Phule describes the next leader of the Aryans to be Brahma. Brahma has a central place in Hindu mythology with the Brahmans claiming that they came from his head, the Kshatriyas from his arms, the Vaishyas from his stomach and the Shudras from his feet. The Vedas are also claimed by the Brahmans to have come from Brahma’s mouth. Phule debunks all these stories as deliberate distortions by cunning Brahmans to fool the masses, and reinterprets Brahma in an ingenious way. After Vaman died, the Aryans had no significant leader, says Phule, and hence a cunning and avaricious Brahman clerk by the name of Brahma, who first invented the art of writing on palm leaves, got a chance to take over. Brahma, says Phule, composed little poems like those of the Parsis (Phule is obviously referring to the Avesta and the Gathas of Parsi Zoroastrians) which along with a few magical incantations, popular in his days, he put down on palm leaves and this (according to Phule) gave birth to the subsequent belief that the Vedas came from the mouth pf Brahma.

Taking advantage of the death of the native King Banasira, Brahma invaded his kingdom of ‘kshetra’ and after defeating the inhabitants (Kshatriyas) sought to permanently humiliate them by reducing them to the position of Shudras by debarring them from education (reading Sanskrit texts, etc.). Parshuram, the sixth incarnation of Vishnu, Phule goes on to tell us, succeeded Brahma as the head of the Aryans. It was at this time that the small group of Kshatriyas, still left unconquered, attacked Parshuram 21 times. The Aryans called them the ‘maha-ari’ or the ‘great enemy’ and described them as a demon race (daitya) who had rebelled against the Gods. Parshuram’s historical defeat of the ‘maha-ari’ is mythologically described as the wiping out of the Kshatriya race from the face of the earth.

However, the historical fact, says Phule, is that the banished ‘maha-ari’ were reduced to such misery and poverty that in order to survive they even had to eat the flesh of dead animals. Thus were bom the Mahar and Mang communities whom the high castes consider unclean or untouchable because they eat dead animals’ meat. Since the brave ancestors of the present day Mahar and Mang communities were the valiant last resisters, the Brahmans marked them out for the most severe punishment. Thus they were forced to wear a black thread round the neck as a sign of identification and were to be treated as Ati-Shudra, people whom even the other Shudras could not touch.