Towards a non-Brahmin Hinduism: caste, dharma, and the Marathi public sphere, circa 1890 – 1930

Thesis

My dissertation project titled Towards a Non-Brahmin Hinduism: Caste, Dharma, and the Marathi Public Sphere in Western India, circa 1890 – 1930 is an exploration of the intellectual oeuvre of non-Brahmin writers who decisively shaped the social and religious contours of the Marathi public sphere in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Western India. My aim is to critically evaluate this non-Brahmin Marathi discourse through engaging with the writings of intellectuals who belonged to the Satyashodhak movement i.e. The Truth-Seeking Movement. This work focuses on how the evolving non-Brahmin print and performative spheres, through their writing styles, content, speeches, linguistic registers, and street performances, sought to reconstruct themes and issues revolving around caste, dharma and Brahminism in distinctly anti-Brahminical idioms. In the process, I argue that these expressions contributed toward the conceptualizations of a non-Brahmin Hinduism. By mapping this immediate transition phase after Jotirao Phule’s death in 1890, this work investigates the dynamism of radical and conservative streaks in the social and political expressions of Satyashodhak writers amidst their contestation of the hegemonic Brahmin writerly discourse.

By focusing on the Satyashodhak movement, which was founded with the core principle of critiquing the caste system and the Brahmin conceptualizations of dharma and societal relations, this work engages with the central paradox of the movement’s trajectory from being a radical organization, as was envisioned by Jotirao Phule, to a body that got itself involved in reimagining different facets of Hindu dharma. However, I also argue that these writers saw themselves as intellectual writers and philosophers who believed in the emancipatory potentialities of the newspaper centric print sphere. This nurturing of the Satyashodhak thought was undertaken through a decentered movement wherein these writers possessed the autonomy to express themselves through different genres like editorials, novels, poetry, and satire. At the same time, what brought these writers together were their commonly held beliefs about anti-Brahminism which began to also bind them together in the quest for non-Brahmin articulations of ‘Hinduness’ and what it meant to be an ideal Hindu. By focusing on this parallel genealogy of a modern non-Brahmin Hinduism, my aim is to contribute to the growing scholarship which emphasizes on the non-linear and complex developments concerning caste, dharma, and Brahminism in Modern India.

Authors: Thube, S

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-j26azjn7x
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: non-Brahmin; print sphere; caste; Marathi public sphere; Hinduism
• Subjects: Cultural and intellectual history of late 19th and early 20th century western India