Law beyond Untouchability: From Temple Entry to Atrocity and Legal Change

During the independence movement, the key concerns that emerged regarding ameliorating the situation for untouchable castes were temple entry and access to public places. Access to public spaces and facilities, such as the water tank in Mahad, was important to Ambedkar's movement in the 1920s. Ambedkar led temple entry movements such as the one in Pune in 1929, but he seemed to have lost interest in this strategy by the early 1930s. In fact, it was Gandhi who gained prominence in the movement that wanted to establish temple entry for untouchable castes during the independence movement. The constituent assembly later adopted an article that abolished untouchability and prohibited and criminalized its practices (Article 17). The article represents a strategy for addressing the problem of untouchability in the independent Indian state. In Gandhi's perspective, temple access represented an idea of holism and a vision of accommodating everyone, including every caste within the Hindu fold. He wanted to harmonize society and integrate untouchables into the Hindu social order in ways that corresponded with the adaptation of the rites and customs of the superior castes. Gandhi was one of the several social reformers within the Hindu fold, and the focus on temple access for untouchables represented an element of social reform in the nationalist movement. But the idea of temple entry introduced the idea of religious inclusion into the public sphere. It represented a discourse that did not entirely correspond with the basic problems of exclusion that the Dalits encountered. This early approach was unhelpful in relation to curbing the caste-based violence that frequently happened to Dalits. Caste-based violence was a legal anomaly, and it resulted in several changes in law and terminology during the postcolonial period. In this chapter, I argue that the focus on temple access in this early approach to caste was inadequate to address caste-based oppression. The hegemonic narrative at the time of the independence focused on untouchability and access to temples, but this approach underwent changes because gaining entry to temples would not solve the persistent trend of caste-based violence. New discourses created legal changes. These changes could be viewed as learning processes that concerned how the Dalit problem of enduring oppression could be conceptualized. It became clear that a concept such as civil rights and the idea of temple entry misrepresented the basic problems of Dalits, especially caste-based violence.