I conducted 12 months’ ethnographic fieldwork in the BDD Chawls neighbourhood in Lower Parel in 2017. On my initial walks around the neighbourhood in January, I would often notice men wearing t-shirts with an image of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar on the front, and the statement “We are Indians, firstly and lastly” on the back.
What, I wondered at the time, was the significance of this message? And why would a picture of Ambedkar be associated with such an apparently jingoistic statement? The first hint at an answer came a few months later when, walking around the BDD Chawls one afternoon, I came across a large group of Dalit Buddhist acquaintances outside the police station. Sayaji, hands flying and face in a characteristic grimace of frustration, was in the middle of an angry exchange with a police officer. I did not linger, but over the next few days I pieced together the following story.
The space between Chawl M, a building dominated by members of the Maratha community, and the more mixed Chawl N building was historically used as a ground for playing kabaddi. At the back is the Buddha Vihar (temple), a shed-like structure with a tin roof, owned and managed by a committee of Dalit Buddhists and used for prayers and cultural programmes.
Some years ago, the Buddha Vihar committee declared its intention of laying a tiled footpath from the street to the vihar, to facilitate access. Although the area it would cross had long since fallen out of use as a kabaddi ground, certain residents of Chawl M raised objections to the proposed footpath, stating that they wished to revive the space’s sporting function. This escalated into a dispute between Chawl M members and the users of the Buddha Vihar which was eventually brought to the local police station, who ruled in March 2017 that tiles could be laid since the vihar is registered with the Public Works Department. The police also requested that when Chawl M residents organise cultural programmes in the space, the Dalit Buddhists should support them, and vice versa when Buddhist functions are held.
Manish, a Dalit Buddhist friend, explained that Chawl M and several other buildings in the neighbourhood were exclusively occupied by Marathas and that the residents maintained an informal embargo on renting or selling rooms to Dalits. He attributed the Chawl M residents’ behaviour over the Buddha Vihar paving stones to the fact that “They do not believe that ‘We are Indians, firstly and lastly’. Caste is more important to them.”
He explained that the t-shirts I had seen featuring this message were left over from the 2015 Ambedkar Jayanti celebrations organised by the neighbourhood branch of the Republican Party of India. The aphorism is popularly attributed to Ambedkar and appears to have originated in a 1938 Bombay Legislative Assembly debate, “On the creation of a separate Karnataka province”, in which Ambedkar argued that the “dismemberment” of India into states organised on linguistic lines would undermine his ideal of “want[ing] all people to be Indian first, Indian last and nothing else but Indians”. He re-used the expression elsewhere, and, as “We are Indians, firstly and lastly”, it is now frequently used, devoid of context, in online Republic Day and Independence Day greetings.
Manish, however, appeared to use the formula to convey an egalitarian loyalty to India, in contrast to the hierarchical caste affiliations he perceived among his Hindu neighbours. In subsequent conversations he went further and explicitly described himself as a nationalist, sometimes using the English word, sometimes the Marathi rashtrawadi. Numerous other Dalit Buddhist friends of mine referred to themselves as nationalists in our discussions, and sometimes invoked the idea of being Indians, firstly and lastly. This surprised and disconcerted me, coming from a community that had experienced centuries of suffering in India, including at the hands of those with the most vocal claim to Indian nationalism in the present day: the right-wing Hindu nationalist forces of the BJP and its paramilitary parent organisation, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
This surprise takes us to the central motifs of the book: how do people talk about history and how does this shape their lives? Why do they sometimes think in ways that others might not expect? So many disputes over history are in fact embedded in arguments about nationhood and nationalism: Vladimir Putin’s rhetorical (and in places quite literal) erasure of Ukrainian history in service of an imperial conception of Russian nationalism; Conservative British politicians’ appeals to the idea of a pristine Merrie England of warm beer, tolerance, no migration and a global civilising mission. Much Hindu nationalist rhetoric is steeped in ideas of an ancient India that was fundamentally and eternally Hindu, ideas roundly challenged by many prominent historians in India, including Ambedkar himself.
But so often, less prominent individuals’ conceptions and experiences of nationalism are overlooked unless they fit into clearly understood categories such as majoritarian nationalism or minority separatism. “Dalit Buddhist nationalism” – or being Indians, firstly and lastly – sits uncomfortably outside these more familiar moulds but underpins my interlocutors’ political and cultural engagement with wider Indian society.
For my Dalit Buddhist friends, this vision of nationalism is premised on an understanding of history that casts Dalits as original inhabitants in an ancient Buddhist India characterised by egalitarian rationalism, and subsequently destroyed by the imposition of inegalitarian Hinduism by ‘Aryan’ invaders. In Buddhism lies the solution to India’s present-day problems, but the Hindus of Chawl M do not accept their position on the Buddhist side of the Aryan-Buddhist divide, and they remain the neighbourhood caste oppressors in an ambivalent everyday dynamic characterised more by microaggressions and surprisingly close bonds than by open hostility.
“We are Indians, firstly and lastly” is best understood as a claim to space in the discursive imagination of the nation, a claim that rejects the paths of separatism and globalism and critiques majoritarian Hindu nationalism. It is an appeal for both redistribution of power and opportunity while also demanding recognition as a minority and simultaneously espousing a politics of universalism (“We are all Indians, firstly and lastly”) and a politics of difference (“We alone are Indians, firstly and lastly”). Given the Dalit Buddhists’ special connection to the Constitution through Ambedkar, and to ancient India through Buddhism, they are readily able to frame these appeals as nationalism.
Excerpted with permission from Fake Gods and False History: Being Indian in a Contested Mumbai Neighbourhood, Jonathan Galton, UCL Press.
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