P. Sainath

large_01-P1000342-PS-The_agony__the_ajaat.jpg

medium_01-P1000342-PS-The_agony__the_ajaat.jpg

small_01-P1000342-PS-The_agony__the_ajaat.jpg

thumbnail_01-P1000342-PS-The_agony__the_ajaat.jpg

01-P1000342-PS-The_agony__the_ajaat.jpg

Amitabh Bachchan has said that if ever asked
about his caste by Census enumerators, his answer would be: Caste –
Indian.  That, of course, would do little
more than stoke the media’s Bollywood feeding frenzy yet again. Shyam Maharaj
is no Bachchan. Nor is his brother, Chaitanya Prabhu. But they and the
followers of their fraternity are likely to throw up far more complex answers –
and questions – if Census enumerators do finally pop that query on caste. “Our
answer: we are ajaat.
Here is my school leaving certificate to prove that. But you can write what you
like,” Prabhu tells us at his house in Mangrul (Dastgir) village of Amravati district in Maharashtra.

Ajaat literally means people
without caste. The ajaat was a bold social movement of the 1920s
and ’30s that at its peak had tens of thousands of committed followers in what
are present-day Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. It was led by the
colourful and eccentric social reformer Ganpati Bhabhutkar better known as
Ganpati Maharaj.  Chaitanya Prabhu and Shyam
Maharaj are his surviving grandsons. Apart from the usual anti-liquor and
anti-violence norms of such movements, Ganpati Maharaj threw in others. He
attacked caste frontally. Many stopped idol worship at his call. He pressed for
gender equality and even railed against private property. And, in the 1930s, he
and his followers declared themselves as ‘ajaat’.

His inter-caste dining drive raised
hackles in the villages he worked in. As one of his disciples P. L. Nimkar put
it: “He would ask his followers from all castes to bring cooked food from their
homes. This, he would mix up totally and distribute the mix as prasad.”  Caste was his great target. “Inter-caste
weddings and widow remarriage – that’s what he sought and achieved,” says
Prabhu. “In our own family, from granddad to us, we married into 11 different
castes, from Brahmins to Dalits. In our extended family there have been scores
of such weddings.” 

Ganpati Maharaj himself had such a marriage. He
also “created the religion of ‘maanav’ (humanity) and opened the temple here
to Dalits, offending the upper castes,” says Shyam Maharaj. “They filed cases
against him and no one would touch his case. All the vakils here at the time were Brahmins.”

The movement waned over years, as some
followers left on the caste issue, and with its Guru’s death in 1944. (He is
buried at a community centre he built here decades ago, just opposite Prabhu’s
house). Still, it remained known and respected for some time after Independence.
“See my school leaving certificate,” says Prabhu, showing it to us.  “As late as the 1960s, even the ’70s, we
still got certificates calling us ajaat. Now, schools and colleges say they’ve
never heard of us and won’t give our children admission.” 

The surviving ajaat are not doing too well. Shyam and Prabhu just about make ends
meet as petty agricultural traders. 

Forgotten by the late ‘70s, the ajaat
were re-discovered some years ago by Nagpur journalists Atul Pandey and Jaideep
Hardikar. Their reports sparked a Maharashtra government move to help them. But
that died with the exit of the one senior official who had shown interest in
the matter.

Ajaat candidates can’t contest panchayat polls. Poll officials
refuse to accept their forms – which state no caste. “Ajaat
folk can’t get ration cards without a huge struggle,” says Prabhu.  College admissions, scholarships and
government jobs elude them for the same reasons.  Other villagers won’t marry into these
families now as their caste status lacks clarity. In short, the followers of a
once proud anti-caste reform movement have been reduced to a couple of thousand
people viewed as something like a caste
themselves. 

“My niece Sunaina could not get into college,”
says Prabhu. “The college said: ‘we don’t recognise this ajaat.
Bring us a proper caste certificate and we’ll admit her’.” His nephew Manoj,
who did finally make it to college, says: “They treat us as an oddity there. There
were no scholarships for any of us. No one there believes such a thing as ajaat
exists.” A restless younger generation feels imprisoned by the past. Many of
the ajaat, including Prabhu’s family, have faced the
ignominy of having to trace out an ancestor whose caste could be clearly proven.

“Imagine our humiliation,” he says. “We
have to take out caste certificates for our children.” Not easy, given the
generations of inter-caste marriages these families have seen. And even the
ledger of the village kotwal lists them as ‘ajaat.’ Some have had to trace a
great grandfather whose caste could be established. “To recover and rebuild
those old records is a horrible job,” says Prabhu. “The authorities suspect us
of concealing things and faking our caste. And it hurts us like anything to
make these caste certificates.  But
without them our children are truly stuck.” Sadly, they had no choice but to
trace out the caste origin of anti-caste crusader Ganpati Maharaj himself.  That was needed for his great-grandchildren.

Quite a few of the remaining 2,000 or
so ajaat gather at that community centre in this village
in November each year. “Now there is only one such family we have contact with
in Madhya Pradesh,” says a glum Prabhu. The rest are in Maharashtra. “Only 105
are formally registered with our body, the Ajaatiya Maanav Sanstha. But far
more than that come to our annual meeting. However, consider that we once had
60,000 members in this movement.”

“We need a much more comprehensive
survey of caste than the mere introduction of a question in the Census will
permit,” says economist Dr. K. Nagaraj (formerly with the Madras Institute of
Development Studies) who has worked on the subject. “That we need caste data is
beyond doubt. But we need that data in a frame that captures the huge diversity,
location-specific nature, and the many other complexities of caste. A single
question in the 2011 Census will not achieve that. This is perhaps a job for
the National Sample Survey and its team of trained investigators with much
advance preparation.”

So what happens if that enumerator does
come around to your house with the question on caste? “Believe me,” says
Prabhu, “It will confuse him. I think they should create a different category
in the Census for people like us. We must declare who we are. We have fought
against everything that stands for caste. But in this society, caste is in
everything.” 

This <a href="http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/The-agony-amp-the-ajaat/article13666079.ece">article</a> (slightly modified here) was
originally published in The Hindu on June 4,
2010.

The agony & the ajaat

অজাতের যাতনা

അജാതരും ദുരിതങ്ങളും

வேதனையும், சாதியற்ற மனிதர்களும்

ଆଜାତଙ୍କ ଦୁଃଖ

अजात, जिन्हें ख़ुद एक जाति बना दिया गया

اجات، جسے خود ایک ذات بنا دیا گیا

जातीत जखडलेले अजात

Mangrul Dastgir

At present, we can only accept donations in Indian rupees by Indian citizens. All donations made to the CounterMedia Trust are eligible for exemption under Section 80G of the Income Tax Act, 1961. Here is a copy of our exemption certificate.


India is bigger than New Delhi. And people need to know more about the rest of this vast nation.


Younger, media-saturated generations are growing up knowing little about their country, but a lot about the elites of a few metros and towns. For a narrowly-owned, commercially-driven media, the dumbing down of a nation is part of standard operating procedure. The last available data of the Centre for Media Studies (CMS, Delhi) show us that reports from New Delhi account for 66 per cent of news on the front pages of major dailies. The CMS data also found that just about 0.24 per cent of front page news came out of rural India. The TV channels are not much better.PARI exists to change that.We are a non-profit organisation. We publish under creative commons, and do not charge readers a subscription fee or put-up advertisements. Nothing is behind a paywall and we are completely free-to-access by anyone. We guard our independence and receive no direct grants from governments and corporations, nor any funding that could dictate our content. So, we are dependent on volunteer labour, donations from individuals, foundations and institutions that see value in independent and free media.PARI is changing the way Indian journalism reports and documents the rural.India is more than the elite of a few metros and towns. We report on rural lives and livelihoods, languages, communities, migrants and more. We need your help to pull off this most ambitious of Indian journalistic endeavours. The scale of this effort costs money. Donate generously - and spread the word about PARI.&nbsp;

Donate FAQs


Let’s get you acquainted

Welcome to PARI

All our content is, and will forever be free to consume. If you enjoy our work, you can support us by becoming a volunteer or by donating to help fund our work.

Want to republish this article? Please write to <a href="mailto:zahra@ruralindiaonline.org" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">zahra@ruralindiaonline.org</a> with a cc to <a href="mailto:namita@ruralindiaonline.org" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">namita@ruralindiaonline.org</a>

The agony & the ajaat

The ajaat, who formed a once proud anti-caste movement, have been reduced to an isolated group viewed as a caste themselves. A new documentary of the same name has been prompted by this June 2010 article

Related stories

A rain-scented walk in Sivagangai

Living on ravaged land

Biswas and the bamboos on his bike

Recycling energy, Godda style

Bhadels of Goa

Pookadai: still throbbing with morning life

Koli Kadlas

Malnourishment high among children of migrants: study

Wheels of the rural Indian West

Living Under a Red Cloud in Bellary

Vedla – earrings of the Maher community

Dreaming of water, drowning in debt

Kali: the dancer and his dreams

Farmer's diet worse than a convict's

In Yavatmal, life goes on

Suicides are about the living, not the dead

Death of a carpenter

Hoisa Shigmo!

Women farmers: weaving a life in Anantapur

Defiant in Dhinkia

Spice and all that's nice

Kerala's Green Army

The ‘jugaad’ not-a-mobile

Health as someone else's wealth

Calibrating in a Kudumbashree assembly unit