Hindi Hindu Histories puts a spotlight on four individuals who were perennial “others” – characters in the footnotes of literature and history. This is a fate they did not deserve because their writings, though now available only in a handful of libraries and archives, represent pioneering contributions in their respective fields.
The first of them, Santram (1887–1988: he lived to the age of 101), rose to prominence by his contributions to anti-caste and sexology literature, and from his extensive translations into Hindi. He was a polyglot who consciously chose to write in Hindi because the language was central to the world he identified with and understood the nuances of. Despite employing Khari Boli Hindi, he debunked a standardised, Sanskritised Hindi, and instead translated, vernacularised, and localised it, designing his prose in an eclectic, composite, and simple Hindi with a keen awareness of his readership. Santram was both an author and a social activist.
In 1922 he founded the Jat-Pat Torak Mandal – the JPTM – the name translating as, roughly, “Organisation to Break Caste”. It was this JPTM that, in the summer of 1936, first invited and then disinvited Dr BR Ambedkar to deliver an address – the undelivered speech being then expanded, revised, and converted into Dr Ambedkar’s most famous work, Annihilation of Caste. Santram, though apparently unhappy over the Ambedkar contretemps, has despite the anti-caste direction of his endeavour been put on the sidelines, but he remained the JPTM’s driving force, dedicated to combating caste discrimination and actively promoting inter-caste marriages.
Santram was also a pioneering translator of Marie Stopes’ sexology writings into Hindi. He vehemently opposed brahmacharya, advocated birth control, and proposed heterosexual ethics. Importantly, while as a reformist firmly opposed to what he saw as the retrograde practices which had degraded “true” Hinduism, he was firmly rooted in a Hindu orientation and placed himself within a Hindu framework, implicitly or explicitly. He drew selectively on his understanding of Hinduism to develop conceptual and theoretical tools for different ends. In his literary and aesthetic creations he frequently foregrounded vernacular dreams of utopian freedom and autonomy. His ideal of freedom came from the idealistic concept of a casteless society within a Hindu nation: his anti-caste politics and iconoclasm coexisted with his faith in Hinduism, and in this respect, he occupies a liminal and enigmatic space between Gandhi and Ambedkar. His achievement deserves to be highlighted in any history of Hindi and North Indian Hinduism.
Applauding Santram, an article in The Indian Rationalist stated in 1954: “He waged a major war against the caste system, all on his own, and he succeeded in giving the old demon a bad shake. It is no discredit to him that he attempted the impossible and that the demon is still very much alive and kicking. If the great Buddha failed to destroy caste, where is the chance for another to succeed? But to Sant Ram belongs the credit of repeating the performance of Buddha in recent history. His life deserves close study by every rationalist.”
Santram, though of the Shudra caste, stood apart from other prominent anti-caste radicals such as Ambedkar and Periyar. While they challenged caste by distancing themselves from Hinduism, Santram provided a trenchant critique of caste and advocated caste reform within the paradigm of Hinduism, which accounts both for his limitations and possibilities. His life narrative is significant not only because of its dominant strand of caste suffering, but also because of the other layers discernible, as he takes the middle ground between Gandhi and Ambedkar, bourgeois and subaltern, Arya Samaj and Ad Dharm, and love-hate for Hinduism. It is from this in-between space that Santram produces his anti-caste rhetoric, quoting selectively from past texts to forge a contemporary polemic which shows him simultaneously as a publicist, activist, and social reformer.
Falling between the definable grids, he operates on the margins, which is also in part because of his historical and geographical location. Though from Punjab, he refrained from both Sikh politics and Gurumukhi: most of his writings are in Hindi. When Santram wrote his autobiography in the 1960s he had already mapped out his life in distinct phases which he painted in broad brushstrokes. Vivid and playful, this work is also a piece of propaganda challenging caste. Various episodes in the autobiography are slanted to fit larger scripts, the personal narrative being informed by such elements as his Shudra status, the Arya Samaj, Ambedkar, and the JPTM.
He starts by underlining his ordinariness, while emphasising caste as central to his identity: “I thought that writing one’s autobiography was like flaunting one’s greatness… I am no extraordinary person… For my whole life, I have only struggled against caste and served the Hindi language… My friends said caste is the biggest enemy of India. To remove it would be the biggest service to the nation… Your autobiography will in a way be a history of fighting against caste in modern India and of the diffusion of Hindi in Punjab… Thus I decided to write this book… When a man engages in social reform to eliminate caste, then, not just strangers but even his own family and relatives oppose him. His photos are not published in the papers. No statue is made of him. All his life he must burn on a pyre.”
Through Santram’s life and anti-caste writings, I attempt to illuminate and rethink caste in early-twentieth-century North India. I examine Santram’s accounts of the caste-modulated self, social reform and the nation, the stories he told others about himself, and his anti-caste thought. Santram shows everyday caste taboos around roti-beti, the constraints of Gandhian and Arya Samaj politics, and the flaws in Sanatani Hindu orthodoxy. He moves between private and public, personal and political, self and nation, individual and community, his perspective suggesting how embroiled reformers were within the contradictory currents of colonial India.
He produces multiple meanings and mutable positions on caste, where on the one hand he is a staunch advocate of inter-caste marriages, and on the other ambiguous about caste reform and respectability. Modernity sits uneasily in his work because when attacking caste he relies on reason on the one hand and devotion on the other. This duality alongside his cocktail of ideas makes his life narrative a politicised form of resistance and critique of caste, but equally an account of accepted caste models and messages. His life seems to suggest the possibility of enabling and transforming caste in practically the same breath.
Excerpted with permission from Hindi Hindu Histories: Caste, Ayurveda, Travel, and Communism in Early Twentieth Century India, Charu Gupta, Permanent Black in association with Ashoka University.
