99 Years After Mahad Satyagraha: The Invisible Walls of the Chardar Tank

Today, India marks the 99th anniversary of the Mahad Satyagraha. On March 20, 1927, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar led thousands of Dalits to the Chardar Tank in Maharashtra to drink water, a revolutionary act of reclaiming human dignity. In the popular imagination, this struggle is often viewed as a historical victory, a battle won before the ink of the Constitution was even dry. However, as we stand on the threshold of the centenary, a deep dive into the modern landscape suggests that while the physical tank may be open, the ritual codes of purity and pollution have merely migrated into the boardrooms of industry, the fields of science, and the hidden data of our national surveys.

Professor Atul Thorat of JNU highlights that the exclusion Dr. Ambedkar fought against has become sophisticated and, in many cases, invisible to the urban eye. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the leather industry of Agra. While the world admires the craftsmanship of Agra’s shoes, the Dalit artisans who create them remain trapped in a state of precariousness. Thorat points out a stark contrast with Europe: in Italy or England, a handmade leather shoe is a brand of prestige where the artisan captures the full value and credit. In India, the system is designed to keep the creator hand to mouth. Because the retail, branding, and management systems have been captured by specific business communities, the Dalit worker, despite being the primary skilled worker, is denied the path to becoming an entrepreneur. They are forced to buy raw materials on credit, ensuring they never gather enough capital to start their own enterprise. They provide the skill, but the market system ensures they remain labourers rather than proprietors.

This obsession with ritual hierarchy even acts as a barrier to scientific and medical innovation. Thorat recounts the story of an American-educated PhD engineer who returned to India to revolutionise agriculture using organic manure derived from human waste, what is known as Okla manure in Delhi. "Despite the scientific fact that organically decomposed waste is simply fertilizer, the project collapsed under the weight of caste-based perception. Farmers rejected it, claiming human excreta is defiling and polluting, whereas cow dung is celebrated as pure." Thorat said.

This unscientific divide mirrors a historical tragedy in Indian medicine. Thorat notes that Ayurvedic medicine historically failed to evolve as rapidly as Unani or Chinese medicine because practitioners, bound by codes of purity, refused to perform autopsies or examine polluting bodily fluids like urine and stool. Even today, this manifests in the fields: when truckloads of manure are delivered, the driver may be middle-caste, but the off-loaders are exclusively Dalits, relegated to the task because it is their traditional assignment to handle what the body gives up. This is rooted in the Bühler (1867) definition of Hindu ritualism: anything the body sheds—blood, sweat, spit, or excreta, is considered spiritually polluting for the priest-class, leading to the relegation of these tasks to a designated untouchable group.

The persistence of these practices is backed by hard data that challenges the narrative of a post-caste India. Thorat, who co-authored research with Diane Coffey of Princeton and UT Austin, explains that traditional face-to-face surveys often hit a wall of survey guilt. When an urban interviewer asks a person if they practice untouchability, only about 30% admit to it. However, when the same questions were asked in an anonymised telephonic survey, the mask of political correctness slipped. In Delhi, 40% admitted to practicing untouchability; in rural Uttar Pradesh, that figure surged to 64%.

This data provides a sobering context to the hidden-camera research conducted by the Indian Institute of Dalit Studies (IIDS). Their work documented the covert reality of 21st-century India: Dalit girls in villages sitting in corners for hours, waiting for the sun to set and for every other community to finish before they are allowed to touch the Chhapakaal (handpump). Once they finish, the pump is ritually washed and purified. At village tea stalls, the two-cup system persists, where Dalit men must wash their own glasses kept outside and receive tea poured from a height to avoid physical contact.

From the manual scavengers cleaning sewer lines at night in Maharashtra to the Dome community in Banaras tasked exclusively with cremation, specific occupations remain caste-locked. National Sample Survey data reveals that across hundreds of occupational codes, categories like leather workers and tanners remain almost exclusively the domain of Scheduled Castes. Whether it is the Vaidyas (physicians) of old who were sidelined for their indigenous herb knowledge or the basket weavers of today, the Hindu fold has historically expanded by relegating frontier communities to the status of untouchables based on their proximity to polluting materials like dead hide.

As we enter the 99th year of the movement at Mahad, the message is clear: Article 17 of the Constitution may have abolished the word untouchability, but it has not yet abolished the mind that practices it. The struggle of 1927 was not just about water; it was about breaking the monopoly on merit and purity. Until the skilled artisan in Agra can brand his own shoe and the farmer in Karnataka can see science instead of pollution, the Chardar Tank remains a mirror reflecting a journey that is far from over.