A Dalit Activist’s Quest for Freedom | Arup Kumar Sen

Indian communist parties have often failed in weaving Indian identities into the language of left politics; Dalit or lower caste identities, gender-based identities, tribal identities are prominent among those. India’s protest and social change narratives have had luminous figures such as B R Ambedkar; a Dalit himself who is often seen as a messiah of Dalits. The communists in India have not exactly made Ambedkar their own. The story of a Dalit communist from Maharashtra, the state where Ambedkar belonged, makes for a riveting read.

Memoirs of a Dalit Communist: The Many Worlds of R. B. More, translated by Wandana Sonalkar, edited, and introduced by Anupama Rao (Left Word Books, New Delhi, 2020), is a unique text. The book is a composite text in the sense that it has incorporated R. B. More’s autobiography and his son Satyendra More’s biography of his father. The translator has deftly situated the two segments of the book: “There was in the autobiographical first part a sense of immediacy, of the author being close to his own experience… The son’s biography of his father is weighed down by a sense of hagiographic and ideological purpose.” How the life world of More was viewed in diverse ways has been noted by her: “Both the Dalits and Communists wanted to claim More as their own, and yet were uncomfortable with his association with ‘the other side’. Also, More’s family felt that his contribution had not been fully appreciated by either side.”

Anupama Rao’s introduction offers valuable insights about the autobiographical text: “This rare text, the Marathi-language autobiography of the important, if under-acknowledged, Dalit labour organizer Ramchandra Babaji More (1903-1972), suggests a more complex confrontation between caste and class in twentieth-century Bombay…The account we have before us is thus as much a subaltern history of Bombay, as it is the autobiography of a Dalit Marxist”. At the beginning of his father’s biography, Satyendra More informed the reader: “Comrade R. B. More… was born on 1 March 1903 in the maternal uncle’s village Ladawali, in Mahad tehsil, Raigad district (formerly Colaba district) in the Mahar caste (then considered to be untouchable).” However, his grandfather Shivram got settled in the Maharwada in village Dasgaon, Mahad tehsil.

We have found that More’s autobiography covered the period up to 1927. The reader gets interesting reflections of the author about his village and city life. While writing about his childhood days, More noted: “When I was five or six years old I began to attend the Marathi school in Dasgaon. At the time, in the entire Konkan region, there was no village Marathi school for Dalits other than the school in Dasgaon…Our school in Dasgaon is quite an old school. When I started going to school, it had only two teachers. The children attending the school were from those castes counted as shudras…the oppression experienced elsewhere because of untouchability did not come the way of us villagers of Dasgaon.” He further observed: “The (Mahar) people of Dasgaon broke the restrictions of religion and tradition to build large houses and wear fine clothes and ornaments. They obtained school education and acquired high government posts.”

More experienced oppressive and humiliating untouchability when he went to orthodox Alibag district to appear in the high school scholarship examination in 1914: “The question paper was tossed to me from a distance and when I had finished writing my paper, I pushed it forward. It was picked up from there and taken away. All this was carried out with the utmost care to avoid touching me at any point.”

A vivid description of his first visit to Bombay was recorded in the autobiography: “For the first time in my life I saw railway trains , motorboats, brightly shining electric lights in buildings and on the roads, cars, horse carriages, the rattling of trams, the sirens of ships and the textile factories, people wearing all kinds of different costumes, enormous hotels and restaurants serving drinks and food, bars for alcoholic drinks and toddy, markets selling meat, fish, vegetables and flowers, shops and markets selling clothes, shops selling silver and gold. I had this chance to see Bombay because I came for the examination at Alibag.” The author had to leave school for lack of money. In his later visit to Bombay for getting a job,he came to know about Dr. B R Ambedkar and got influenced by his ideas for freedom: “After coming to Bombay I had been staying with a distant relative in a chawl in Family Lines…During this visit to Bombay I saw Dr. Ambedkar for the first time. Seeing Dr. Ambedkar made me acutely aware of the importance of getting an education. I had to leave school halfway because there was no one to support me.”

Subaltern social life in Bombay found mention in the autobiographical narrative: “The Batatyachi Chawl where our theatre room was located was in the Safed Galli. This Safed Galli was a big centre of the prostitution business. All the chawls in the area were buzzing with prostitutes. Prostitutes lived in some of the rooms in Batatyachi Chawl and tamasha players and other people lived in the remaining rooms. The tamasha of the Shivasambha Kavalapurkar company was very famous in those days…In those days the main form of entertainment for common people was the tamasha. Theatrical plays had not become popular.”

More got a job in a Sailors’ Home in Bombay. He documented his job role there: “There were lodgings for the seamen and a bar selling beer and other types of alcoholic drinks in that place. My task was to give them receipts for bed tickets and bar tickets and hand over the money collected to the officer.” Having found that the environment in Bombay was not conducive for study, More moved to Pune and observed people in transit: “There were about twenty rupees in my pocket. It was about midnight. I went to Bori Bunder station and got on the train to Pune without buying a ticket, and got down in Pune before sunrise…There were several village folk, men and women, waiting to go to Bombay. I spent quiet a long time watching their movements and listening to their talk and laughter…Some people would never leave their village to go to any other village. Even those people who came to live and work in Bombay or Pune from the villages did not know anything beyond their village and their place of work and residence in Bombay or Pune.So my coming to Pune from Dasgaon was probably like my coming from England to Hindustan for them.”

After coming to Pune, More found employment in an arsenal. The reader gets an idea of the division of labour then prevailing in the arsenal from his narrative: “My job was to get the work done from them according to the sergeant’s instructions. I had got a supervisor’s post, above that of the coolies, just because I knew some English. But my pay was that of a coolie…After my work as a mukadam was finished I was given the job of a marker…Later I was promoted to working as a packer in the packing department. The work of a packer was a sort of clerical job…Some time after I started working as a packer, I was given the job of voucher clerk and after some months I became a ledger clerk. All these jobs were carried out under the supervision of white officers…The difference between a coolie and a clerk was only in the hardness of their labour. A clerk did not have to put in as much bodily exertion as a coolie did. In fact, both the jobs needed no intellect!”

Before coming back to his village Dasgaon from Pune via Bombay, More witnessed “the unprecedented event of Tilak’s funeral procession” in 1920. He was a victim of the practice of untouchability while he went to Mahad for studying in an English school. In his second coming to Mahad, More noticed a distinct change in social life of the region: “…I had entered the school at Mahad for the second time as a student who was wiser than before…This time I moved around fearlessly in the school and in the market at Mahad…

After I was admitted to the school in Mahad for the first time, a restaurant had been started in the marketplace to solve the problem I, and my brethren coming from the villages, faced in getting drinking water…But now there were more customers visiting the restaurant…During this time I could gather information from persons coming from villages from all over, just by sitting there. That restaurant had become a virtual information centre for a circle of about sixty square miles around Mahad. Raigad, Pratapgad and the villages of the valley come within that circle…I learned that even though the Mahars were in a minority in these villages, they did not bend before the people of the other castes…The importance that Mahad has assumed in the movement for the liberation or freedom of the untouchables can be traced back to that restaurant. The first reverberations of the Chavdar lake movement (1927) and of Ambedkar’s great deeds began from here.”

R. B. More’s incomplete autobiography did not cover the period of his life after 1927. He became a member of the undivided communist party in India in 1930 and opted for the CPI (M) after the party split in 1964. His son, Satyendra More’s biography of his father, incorporated in the book, documented the post-communist life of R. B. More. That is another story of the Dalit activist’s quest for freedom.

(I am indebted to Dr. Sunandan Roy Chowdhury alias Babu for drawing my attention to the book, motivating me to write the review and brushing it up for publication)