‘The Shudra Rebellion’: Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd studies the vital role of oppressed castes in India

The slogan-shouting and muscle flexing on the basis of caste and class were in full bloom during the elections in Maharashtra. It is a spectacle for all of India now. These elections have also opened up a Pandora’s box amid the demand for reservation of Marathas (Kshatriyas or Shudras) in Maharashtra. It is the same Maharashtra that had foregrounded the first non-brahmin movement led by Mahatma Jyotirao Phule, along with his partner Savitribai Phule. It was the first act of an assigned Shudra rebelling against the brahmanical patriarchal dogmatic order. Amidst this chaos, I came across a very important and apt intellectual work, The Shudra Rebellion by scholar Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, to understand these times. ughts.

Shudras in the age of frenzy

The book lays out the territory for the reader in terms of time and space, to understand the banal narrative of Hindi, Hindu, and Hindutva. This narrative has inverted the idea of a nation. Nation, the author says, has now been imagined via a cultural communitarian idea. This culture is an extension of the above majoritarian trio crafted by a deliberate and mythical construct of history. This mythologisation of history is the outcome of textuality – a limited birth but worth deciding on systemic structure.

The author draws attention to the discourse that demeans the bodily labour performed by Shudras, as their work is labelled as polluting. Whereas the work done by Brahmins is upheld as meritorious as well as pure. The beauty of this text is that the author never shies away from mentioning names, and states clearly that this is the typical behaviour of a cultural factory named RSS. In this age of frenzy, Kancha Ilaiah theorises about the category of Shudra and talks about their view of history. In fact, it is like a neo-renaissance for readers. Enumerating several varieties of Shudras – part of the varna system as well as of gender discrimination – who are bereft of dignity, he writes about their lives.

The author foregrounds an alternative history by making the readers rethink the materialistic, philosophical basis and discursive treatment of the Harappan Civilisation in Indian academia guarded by ‘Dwija’ intellectuals. He analyses the mythology, proposes new theories, and uses recent scientific works like that of award-winning Tony Joseph to support his argument of Shudras being the true founders of the civilisation of India, arguing that they lost out to the cunning and manipulation of the brahmanical agents who deliberately demeaned the Spade civilisation of Shudras.

The author’s re-categorisation leads, therefore, to a retelling of the story of two civilisations. He proposes that history-writing has neglected the story of the Spade civilisation, which upheld the dignity of common people, women and their history of labour. But it lost the clash of civilisations and victory fell into the hands of those with bookish knowledge. The author contends that this arrested the civilisational mobility of India when compared with other world civilisations.

This, says Kancha Ilaiah, was also replicated in the world of cognition, and the Shudras were denied philosophical and spiritual democracy. He conducts a comparative study of theories and praxis of different civilisations to make his point, going further out on a limb and comparing it to intellectual black magic, something that took control of the minds of Shudras and women, reducing them to a mere animal-like existence. I couldn’t help but recall our Mahatma Jyotirao Phule’s famous dictum,

Without education wisdom was lost; 
Without wisdom moral was lost; 
Without moral development was lost;
Without development wealth was lost;
Without wealth Shudras were ruined;
So much has happened through lack of education.

One can’t resist comparing the systemic injustice presented here to Hannah Arendt’s work, where she categorises people suffering similarly as being reduced to Animal Laboron.

I truly enjoyed reading the chapter on Shudra kings, especially the way the author portrays Shivaji Maharaj and his saga of coronation. Also worth reading is a letter reproduced by Chhatrapati Shahu Maharaj, the king of the former princely state of Kolhapur. He is the same maharaja who introduced reservation for backward classes in his administration, and also supported BR Ambedkar’s pending education. He was the first to declare that Ambedkar was to be the future leader of Dalits in the historic Mangaon Parishad, and sponsored Ambedkar’s first periodical Mooknayak. His pragmatic, intellectual analysis of brahmanical societal moralities and attempts to strike strategic alliances with the British to overthrow the brahmanical system is brilliantly put forth by the author. This is an astonishing discovery for readers.

Jyotirao Phule repeatedly visits the text as Kancha Ilaiah analyses his writings, Cultivator’s Whipcord, and Slavery. The author argues that Phule is the true theoretician of the praxis of Shudra labour, and an apt counter to brahmanical textuality. He nudges the readers towards an alternative reading of history, in which they use their own reasoning instead of pre-existing frameworks or “isms”.

The hegemony of culture and language

Using a contemporary cultural and political framework, the author analyses the ideas of English education, local language education, and the idea of the imposition of Hindi. He links it symbiotically to the cultural hegemony of Sanskrit that followed the same methodology earlier. Thus, the book shows that language with its own culture and politics has a huge effect on the crafting of the public sphere as well as on constructing the edifice of self-rule. Kancha Ilaiah doesn’t preach – he suggests ways to tackle these crises. We may agree or disagree with him, a freedom that is of prime and utmost importance in the realm of Constitutional morality.

This work is also to be appreciated for its stand on the 2020 farmer’s agitation movement in India. I was swept away by the fact that a response to a social and political crisis can be a cultural and intellectual one.

Certainly there are lacunae in the text, but the bold ideas presented here compel the reader to ponder over and analyse historical events, the politics of knowledge production, the methodology of deeming some things as pure or impure, and how intellectual hegemony is established. Kancha Ilaiah presents numerous questions that merit several rounds of reading.

The Shudra Rebellion, Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, South Side Books/Hyderabad Book Trust.