Introduction
This article studies the role of pigs in the histories of Dalits, caste Hindus, Muslims, and colonial officers in colonial North India, arguing that domestic pigs, semi-wild pigs, and wild pigs were seen in different ways by people from different communities. It argues that domestic and semi-wild pigs, which were reviled by orthodox Hindus and Muslims, and upwardly mobile Dalit groups, were a resource to many Dalit groups, who used them as a source of power and resistance against exploitation.
The wild pig was, variously, a source of entertainment, heroism, masculinity, collaboration, and knowledge-production for colonial ruling elites—civil-military officers, elite sportsmen/hunters, and native ruling elites: nawabs, rajas, rais, zamindars, etc. A domestic pig was, however, a sign of demonism, impurity, disorder, and communal tension for orthodox Hindus and Muslims but was used by Dalits as a source of power. This article attempts to historicise pigs in caste, Dalit, and animal histories of colonial United Provinces (UP).Footnote 1 While the history of pigs is a somewhat neglected topic, some anthropologists and historians, mainly those dealing with environmental issues, have written about the topic.Footnote 2 Two absences mark their discussions. First, there is little or no attention to how pigs existed in the social world of North India. While the hunting (and even the consumption) of wild pigs was valorised by colonial and some land-owning and warrior elites, these same groups also reviled the domestic pig and its association with Dalits, who usually lived on the outskirts of villages, towns, and cities, where they raised pigs that foraged in the wild, in cultivable lands, and in urban dumps. Second, the scholarship has ignored how national, local, and caste–communal politics influenced the socio-political actions of peasants, villagers, and colonial ruling elites in relation to pigs. This article seeks to fill this absence, suggesting that domestic pigs were an essential part of the social, political, cultural, and economic identities and histories of Dalits. Unlike Yamini Narayanan’s view on politics of ‘binary casteism’,Footnote 3 this article does not accept permanent binaries while studying pigs, castes, and communities.
Pigs had many names in the local languages of North India.Footnote 4 We will use the word ‘pig’ (suar) to refer to wild, domestic, and semi-wild pigs. Sportsmen/hunters of the colonial ruling elite preferred to hunt wild pigs. But studies suggest the presence of semi-wild—escaped, released, and feral—and domestic pigs in and around jungles and agricultural land. Radhika Govindrajan notes the presence of semi-wild pigs (paltu-jungli/domestic-wild) in present-day Uttarakhand. She narrates two episodes: the story of a runaway domestic sow, which became wild; and the experience of a Dalit woman pig-breeder whose pigs ‘chose to exist in a somewhat fluid state of domestication’. Thus, Govindrajan argues, these pigs belonged to ‘the otherwildness’—’a messy wildness’. They resisted the state, masters, and caste Hindus. ‘If pigs wanted to go wild, they would.’ She does not accept the binary of wild and domestic pigs.Footnote 5
Villagers would often fail to distinguish between wild and semi-wild pigs while hunting. Orthodox Hindus and Muslims would also fail to distinguish between domestic and semi-wild pigs while discriminating against Dalits and pigs in their social, religious, cultural, economic, and political lives. This problem often appears in non-forest and non-animal husbandry records because the recorders failed to make distinctions between the two categories. However, paintings and drawings help us understand pig heterogeneity. This article focuses on domestic and semi-wild pigs by using non-forest and non-animal husbandry records in English and Hindi, newspapers, lithographs, police and ethnographical records, and Dalit accounts.
According to some scholars, caste Hindus differentiated between wild and domesticated pigs when it came to eating pork, consuming the meat of wild pigs but not domestic ones. It is commonly assumed that domestic pigs eat human excreta and garbage, while wild pigs do not. Therefore, caste Hindus and Muslims felt disgust towards domestic pigs, their breeders, and those who consumed them. However, studies on their diet suggest that wild, semi-wild, and domestic pigs all eat fresh and rotten food, mud, dung, and excrement.Footnote 6 Caste Hindus hunted and ate wild pigs even though they were linked to Varaha, the third avatar of Vishnu, who saved Bhudevi (Goddess Earth) in Hindu mythology.Footnote 7 The economic justification for this avoidance was that caste Hindus and Muslims preferred to breed cows, buffaloes, goats, and sheep, since ‘the pig does not yield milk, hide nor wool, there is no other reason for keeping it except for its flesh’.Footnote 8 Caste Hindus also preferred to eat the meat of wild pigs because they were beyond the polluting touch of Dalits.Footnote 9 Dalits, on the other hand, valued the meat of domestic pigs.
In the context of caste power and pork politics, Govindrajan notes that although some upper-caste Hindus reviled the meat of domestic pigs, considering it unclean and feeling a ‘visceral disgust’ (ghrina) in relation to it, they nevertheless ate the meat of wild pigs. Caste Hindus considered Dalit pork-eaters to be jungli (wild/uncultured). In this context, she notes that a high-status (thul) Dalit—from the Shilpkar caste—referring to himself as ‘Arya’ refrained from eating pork because he believed that wild pigs in his region were descendants of a runaway sow. According to Radhika Govindrajan, such Dalits ‘reinscribed Brahminical notions of cleanliness’ while resisting upper-caste power, purity, and domination in caste-Hindu food culture. For Govindrajan, ‘the unstable and contingent wildness of the descendants of the runaway sow provided a counterweight […] to caste subordination’. The fluidity of wildness ‘produces the otherwild as a fragile site of maneuver and negotiation […] It is through inhabiting this otherwild that lower castes are able to expose the brittleness of the boundary that separates their wildness from upper-caste civility.’Footnote 10 Govindrajan’s argument here effectively advances the ideology of the twentieth-century Hindu movements that tried to assimilate Dalits into the Hindu fold. It does not recognise the perspectives of Dalits as pig-breeders and pork-eaters, in and of themselves, and that some Dalits resisted the power and discrimination of other ‘Hinduising/Hinduised’ Dalits who were then claiming Rajput, Kshatriya, Aryan, or Hindu identities.
In this article, pigs and their relations with humans are discussed in three sections. The first focuses on the role of upper-caste Hindu representations of domestic pigs in the discourse about untouchability, reform, and caste–communal politics. It shows that upper-caste Hindu reformists and nationalists created aversion towards domestic pigs to mobilise Hinduised Dalits against Muslims, Christians, and Ambedkarite Dalits in colonial UP. It also treats Muslim responses to caste–communal politics and their relations with Dalits on pig-related matters. Essential to the analysis of this article will be the distinction between Dalits who came under the influence of Hindu reformism and in one way or another were encouraged to adopt ‘Aryan’, ‘Rajput’, or ‘Hindu’ identities—who I will refer to as ‘Hinduising’ or ‘Hinduised’ Dalits—and those who resisted this historical process and who increasingly associated themselves with Ambedkar’s civil and human rights movement for Dalits in the twentieth century.Footnote 11 The second section discusses the relationship between pigs and Dalits, arguing for the importance of domestic pigs in the everyday lives of Dalits. It points out that not only did various Dalit sub-castes—Bhangis, Bhars, Chamars, Doms, Khatiks, Nats, Pasis, etc.—rear pigs, but many other Dalit sub-castes ate pork and used pigs in their everyday lives in ways that challenged the orthodoxy of Hindus, Muslims, and Brahmanical culture. It also outlines the role of Dalit pig-breeders, pork-sellers, pork-eaters, day labourers, and bristle traders in developing Dalit society, politics, culture, and economy. I argue that these practices were everyday forms of resistance—what James Scott has called ‘weapons of the weak’.Footnote 12 The third section of the article focuses on two cases leading to individual Dalits becoming Ambedkarites. It discusses the historical background of their transformation, revealing how they confronted caste–communal politics to promote civil and human rights.
Pigs, Dalits, and caste–communal politics
If for Brahmans and other orthodox, upper-caste, Hindi-educated Hindus (hereafter Hindi-Hindus) the cow was considered holy, the domestic pig was viewed as a symbol of impurity, pollution, and social disorder. At the same time, orthodox Muslims shunned pigs for religious reasons.Footnote 13 The pig was thus taboo for both major religious communities in colonial UP.Footnote 14 Thus, historians say, rumours of pig and cow fat being used to grease cartridges were used to mobilise Hindus and Muslims against the colonial state and Christians at the time of the 1857 uprising. Civil stations and military cantonments like Meerut, Kanpur, Allahabad, and Banaras were the centres of mutiny and rumour in North India.Footnote 15 But this issue was not important for Dalits.Footnote 16
The archives show that caste–communal mentalities centred on pigs and cows were deeply rooted in the events of 1857–1858. For example, a letter by Maulvi Syed/Saiyid Qutb Shah Sahib, published by the Bahaduri Press in Bareilly, appeared in vernacular proclamations of leaders like Rani Laxmibai and Nawab Bahadur Khan of Bareilly. It proclaims that
The killing of cows being esteemed one of the greatest sins amongst the Hindoos, the Mahomedan chiefs have agreed to abolish that custom from the day the Hindoos come forward to kill the Europeans. If any Mahomedan acts contrary to this engagement, he is to be considered […] guilty of a heinous crime before God, and should he eat beef, it shall be deemed as pig, and if the Hindu […] do not exert themselves to destroy the Europeans, they will be considered in the sight of God as responsible for the crime of cow killing and eating the flesh of cows. Perhaps Europeans [British and non-British] for their own ends may stipulate with the Hindoos not to kill cows if they will join them.Footnote 17
One can see the same idea in messages to native officers and sepoys ‘urging them by the most sacred oaths to rise and murder their European officers’. If they failed, they would be considered beef- and pork-eaters.Footnote 18
‘The Bone-Dust Story’ was another widespread rumour connected to pigs and cows destroying the caste and religious status of natives. In March 1857, local merchants at Meerut supplied 200 maunds of atta (flour) to retail dealers of the Cawnpore market. The retail dealers were expecting about 800 maunds more.Footnote 19 Hence, the local dealers started selling it at a low rate. Consequently, a ‘sepoy, who had purchased some of the atta from the retail dealer, spread the evil report of its adulteration with bullock’s and pig’s bones ground at the mills’. Although the atta had been inspected, approved, and purchased by a Muslim munshi (clerk) and sepoys, the rumour spread among sepoys in April 1857 that ‘the bone dust of cows and swine had been mixed with the flour by order of the Government’ in order to Christianise sepoys. The ayah of an officer reported that the rumour was everywhere in the bazaar. Another version of the bone-dust rumour had spread in Awadh: that the ‘attah of wheat mixed with powdered human bones was to be eaten; and even distributed […] in every regiment of infantry, cavalry, and artillery’.Footnote 20 By May 1857, such rumours spread to Jhansi and elsewhere, and were considered an important spur to the uprising.Footnote 21
As suggested above, some Muslim intellectuals took a more nuanced approach to the status of pigs and eating pig meat. In the context of colonial society, some Indian Muslim reformers echoed such sentiments. Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), for example, referred to premodern commentaries on the Qur’an that legitimised eating with Christians and argued that Muslims could use vessels in which pork or wine had been served, after washing them.Footnote 22 Yet for many orthodox Muslims, the pig remained a reviled animal and was regularly deployed in the language of public insult. Orthodox Muslims from Deoband, for example, called native Christians ‘pigs’ and considered Europeans sinners because they ate pork.Footnote 23 Referring to various hadiths, the famous Deoband scholar Ashraf Ali Thanvi (1863–1943) declared chess playing ‘haram’ (forbidden) because ‘he who plays chess and then goes directly from there to offer his prayers is like a person who does wudhu (ablution) with the pus and blood of swine before saying his prayers’.Footnote 24
Rumours regarding pig and cow fat also surfaced during local caste–communal and national politics from the late nineteenth century onwards. Although Muslim Congressmen rarely used complaints about pig fat in foreign articles,Footnote 25 Hindi-Hindu nationalists, reformers, agencies, and upper-caste Congressmen used rumours against the colonial state, Christians, Muslims, and Dalits.Footnote 26 Police reports in the 1920s and 1930s document caste–communal tensions fuelled by rumours relating to cows, pigs, and Dalits. In many cases, Hindi-Hindu reformists and their institutions (the Arya Samaj, Hindu Mahasabha, and Sanatan Sabha) were directly involved in spreading such rumours and fomenting tension.Footnote 27 In Sultanpur, for example, after the Bakr-Id festival, ‘a group of Hindus made a show of putting pig meat into the mouth of a Julaha’.Footnote 28 In public meetings at Hamirpur and Bulandshahr, Arya Samajis encouraged Hindus to entertain Dalits and stated, ‘[i]f Muslims [who were converted from Dalit and Shudra castes] would not accept Shuddhi, a pig’s tooth should be placed in their mouths’, or water touched by a pig’s tooth should be given to them.Footnote 29 In Kanpur, a rumour circulated among Muslims that Hindus sought to prevent cow slaughter by using ‘injections of pig blood’.Footnote 30 At Dehradun, the police noted that ‘in one village, Hindu zamindars have granted facilities for opening a pork shop alongside a beef shop in order to compel the Muhammadan butcher to leave’.Footnote 31
Pigs and pork had become symbols of social panic, abuse, and communal tension, and ‘pig’ became a common abusive appellative.Footnote 32 Orthodox Hindus and Muslims abused, targeted, and criminalised Dalit pig- and cow-breeders, and those involved in the trade of pig- and cow-related commodities. For instance, Khatik pig- and cow-breeders were beaten and abusively called Suar Khatiks (Pig-Khatiks). Other Dalit pig-keepers were abusively called Suariya. Pigs and their smell were closely associated with Chuhra Bhangis, Doms, and other Dalit pig-breeders. Chamars, who dealt with dead cows, were also harassed.Footnote 33 In 1921, a sacrificial pig belonging to a Chamar in a village in Gorakhpur somehow entered the houses and farms of Muslims, who prevented Chamars from drawing water from a Muslim well. Later, as a protest, Chamars dug their own well. Local Muslims used the term badqaum (untouchable/lower caste) as a euphemism ‘when they do not wish to use the word suar’.Footnote 34 In this way, pig and Dalit became synonymous in the caste–communal perspective. Just as an Achhut (untouchable/Dalit) and his pig were not allowed to enter localities of orthodox Hindus and their temples, they were also not allowed to enter the localities of orthodox Muslims and their mosques.
The relation between the cow and communal politics is a much-discussed theme among historians.Footnote 35 What is less appreciated is the way cow and pig consumption were typically part of the same communal idiom, and how Chamars and many other Dalits, eating both pork and beef, were deemed doubly impure and often invoked in intercommunal discourses.Footnote 36 During the cow-protection movement in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hindi-Hindu cow protectors circulated an image that showed the ‘Chaurasi Devato Wali Gai’—a holy cow with 84 deities—as a holy mother and a black pig as a cow-slaying demon. Historians agree that the black pig was used as an image against beef-eaters, cowhide-dealers, and tanners, mainly Muslims and Chamars.Footnote 37 In the colonial context, this would also have been used to target Dalit pig-keepers. Indeed, Dalits were commonly represented as being black-skinned rather than fair-skinned ‘Aryans’ by colonial ethnographers and Hindi-Hindu associations.Footnote 38 Once, Dr B. R. Ambedkar asked Madan Mohan Malaviya, a Hindu Mahasabha leader, ‘“Why do you hate the Untouchables?” He replied, “I do not hate them. I simply dislike them for they are black.”’Footnote 39 Chand magazine and the Hindi-Hindu press published many cartoons of Dalits as black.Footnote 40 A late eighteenth-century lithograph shows a pig-seller/breeder as black (Figure 1).Footnote 41
Kawra (hog/pig keeper or seller) in the late eighteenth century. Source: Balthazar, Costume of Hindustan, pl. xi.
Christians also ate beef and pork.Footnote 42 Hindi-Hindu associations were against them, too. They opposed pig-sticking at religious places. For instance, under the Muttra Tent Club’s banner, Britishers and district authorities organised an annual pig-sticking tournament—the Muttra Cup. Local zamindars and princes of the Bharatpur state and Agra province participated.Footnote 43 In April 1926, orthodox Hindus protested against this near Vrindavan, a Hindu religious centre in the Muttra/Mathura district.Footnote 44 Mathura was a centre of the cow-protection movement.Footnote 45 Interestingly, missionaries morally opposed the ritual sacrifice of all animals, and as a result some Dalit Christians stopped sacrificing pigs.Footnote 46 However, they remained victims of caste–communal politics due to their identities and histories.
From the late nineteenth to the mid twentieth century, Hindi-Hindu writers, mainly Sanatanist Brahmans, (re)demonised Dalits due to their ‘unclean occupations’ (including pigs and leather-related work) and their ‘unclean food habits’ (drinking wine and eating pork, beef, and other meat). Such writers, reformists, and nationalists demeaned the work and labour of Dalit pig-breeders, pork-sellers, and bristle/leather-dealers.Footnote 47 They asked Dalits to abandon these practices to remove their untouchability and create pure Hindu bodies. After introducing the project of ‘Dalit Upliftment’, or Achhutoddhar, Hindi-Hindu institutions and the Harijan Sevak Sangh (HSS) under the direction of upper-caste Gandhians successfully influenced a section of ambitious Dalit elites, often chaudharis (caste panchayat headmen), against Muslims, Christians, Adi-Hindus, and Ambedkarite Dalits. They also legitimised the new Kshatriya-Rajput assertions of Dalit chaudharis in the declining Dalit caste panchayats. These Rajputising Dalits joined the caste–communal projects of their masters.Footnote 48 For instance, at Jaunpur and Banaras, Arya Samajis and Thakurs urged Bhars ‘not to keep pigs’ and ‘commit thefts’. Hence, Bhars of Rohawa, Sarai Khuwaja, and Shahganj (in Banaras and Jaunpur) held panchayats and decided they ‘should not drink wine, commit theft [and] keep pigs’. They ‘decided to educate their children, to give up keeping pigs and to outcaste thieves’.Footnote 49 At Etawah, a Chamar panchayat ‘decided to prohibit eating […] the flesh of pigs and dead animals and also to avoid food prepared by Dhanuks’.Footnote 50
In the context of Achhutoddhar, Ramnarayan Rawat has noted the Gandhian discourse of self-purification through vegetarianism among Chamars in eastern UP and Arya Samaji reformist discourse around pure social status and Kshatriya assertion among Jatavs of western UP.Footnote 51 Charu Gupta has noted that the Dalit panchayats introduced codes of Dalit food as a social–moral responsibility in order to improve their social status and uplift their degraded masculinity deriving from pork and beef consumption.Footnote 52 Similarly, Joel Lee has pointed to a ban on pig-rearing and pork consumption by Awadhi Chuhras (a sub-caste of Bhangis) in Sitapur, Lucknow, Barabanki, and Faizabad. Under the influence of Arya Samajis, Awadhi Chuhra and Valmikis (another Bhangi sub-caste), who were sanitation labourers, claimed to be Hindus. They did not rear and sell pigs or eat pork. But Chuhra Bhangis (followers of Lal Beg) in many parts of North India did raise pigs and ate pork, which were parts of their socio-religious lives.Footnote 53 Thus in the name of Achhutoddhar, Hindi-Hindu and Gandhian social organisations used Hinduised Dalits to impose restrictions on pig-rearing, the eating and selling of pork and beef, and tanning.Footnote 54 Some resisted discourses of vegetarianism and Achhutoddhar. For instance, at Kheri, Jaunpur, Hardoi, and Barabanki, Pasis of Nimgoan, Kirakat, Behtagokul, and Mallulalpur ‘decided that they will no longer keep pigs [… and] commit theft [and] those who disobey this resolution are to be outcasted’.Footnote 55 However, another meeting of Pasis held at Jaunpur to discuss social reform was ‘dispersed when several members declared that they could not live without keeping pigs’.Footnote 56
To mobilise Dalits for their political interests and prevent Dalit conversion, Hindi-Hindu agencies (re)invented and spread myths related to pigs, Dalit origins, and communal tensions between Muslims and Dalits. For example, a legend among Khatiks in Jaunpur says,
Once Aurangzeb proceeded to marry a daughter of a Kshatriya Raja. The Raja was unhappy but could not do anything in the matter. However, in order to embarrass or annoy the King [Aurangzeb], he asked his soldiers to bring pigs on the marriage day. When the marriage procession reached his palace, Aurangzeb saw the pigs, and felt betrayed, and since then, the families of the Kshatriya Raja were referred to as ‘Khatik’.
Interestingly, Khatiks in other parts of UP ‘were mostly unaware’ of this legend.Footnote 57 Similarly, Hindi-Hindu associations (re)invented and spread a theory of Dalit degradation.Footnote 58
The caste–communal politics of orthodox Hindus and Muslims worked routinely against Dalit pig-breeders, pig bristle-dealers, and pork/beef-eating labourers. Hindi-Hindu agencies and the HSS provoked Rajputising/Aryanising/Hinduising Dalits to impose caste restrictions against them. In the name of reform, these agencies were reinstalling Brahmanical ideas to mobilise Dalits against Muslims, Christians, Adi-Hindu Dalits, and Ambedkarist Dalits.Footnote 59 There was everyday discrimination and politics both inside and outside Dalit castes.
Pigs, Dalits, and invisible everyday lives
Pigs were (and remain) an economically and ritually essential part of Dalits’ everyday lives. Domestic pigs generated different types of business. ‘Pigs in India [were/are] not very expensive to those who breed them.’Footnote 60 For instance, Khatiks settled in Latouche Road and Coolie Bazaar near the Kanpur railway station. There were two categories: Sonkars (pig-breeders, butchers, and eaters and sellers of pork) and Chaks (vegetable-sellers, breeders of goats and sheep, butchers, and meat-eaters). Day labourers, building contractors, tanners, and bristle/leather traders came from both sides. Sonkar Khatik pork vendors were also ‘known as Bekanwala’—from ‘bacon’. They reared pigs in their bastis (quarters) and in a ground in nearby Anwarganj. They set up unauthorised slaughterhouses and tanneries to meet the growing demand for pork, bristle, and leather in Dalit bastis and bristle/leather markets. In the late colonial period, Khatiks dominated Kanpur’s bristle business. Khatik bristle traders collected bristles, hides, and pigs from Khatiks, Kanjars, Doms, Chamars, Pasis, Bhangis, Koris, Dhanuks, etc., in rural Kanpur and neighbouring districts. They bought bristles from herdsmen and sold them ‘to the wholesale dealer or the agent of some exporting firm’. Between the 1920s and the 1940s, some Khatiks emerged as wholesale dealers and exporters.Footnote 61
Atul Chandra Chatterjee notes, ‘The ordinary Chamar keeps pigs but will not tan their skin.’ Pigskin was available ‘everywhere in large quantities’.Footnote 62 Pig-rearing was ‘a subsidiary activity’ in rural areas. However, a few enterprising Pasis set up piggeries in cities and towns, carrying on ‘good business’. According to ethnographer H. N. Singh, pig-rearing was easy because Pasi breeders did ‘not care very much about the sanitary aspect’ and let their children do it. ‘Many of the school-going children, after school hours, and the others who do not attend school, look to such activities as pig rearing.’Footnote 63 Similarly, Khatik and Chuhra children reared pigs,Footnote 64 leaving family members free for paid work. During the reclamation programmes under the Criminal Tribes Acts, the colonial state encouraged Dalits and tribes to raise pigs due to the growing demand for pig-sticking, pork, and bristles.Footnote 65
Dalits also domesticated pigs to meet the high demand for pigs and pork in rituals and as food. Their pigs used to roam in urban areas and jungles between agricultural lands and villages. Between 1900 and 1922, military authorities sometimes forced Khatiks of Sehore (near Jhansi) to keep their pigs outside the cantonment, perhaps because they did not provide pigs and pork free of cost.Footnote 66 In December 1943, a Hindi-Hindu newspaper, Vartman of Kanpur, described Dalit bastis as suarbaade (pigpens), infested by pigs, pork, bristle, uncleanness, diseases, overcrowding, etc. The Hindi-Hindus criticised the Kanpur district municipal board for failing to prevent the social, political, cultural, and moral disorder created by the Dalits and their pigs.Footnote 67
Pigs also had a variety of ideational and ritual roles in Dalit life. Colonial ethnographers and missionaries—William Crooke, Edward Blunt, George Weston Briggs, Mr Beglar, etc.—collected folk tales, legends, and myths related to pigs and Dalits. These stories often portray the gods and goddesses of Dalits pitted against Hindu gods, chiefs, and upper castes. In a popular Dalit legend titled Bawan Ganga (52 Ganga), a Dhusadh girl and her Brahman husband in Rajgir received as dowry a pig who was the leader of the pigs of Rajgir and used to bathe at Bawan Ganga, a cow (the mythical Surabhi), and a parrot that served in Indra’s court. Indra, the Hindu god of rain, planned to spread famine there. To protect her countrymen and their paddy, the Dalit girl used her animals to fight and defeat Indra’s army of rats and mice.Footnote 68 Similarly, pigs existed in origin myths and legends of Arakhs, Bhangis, and Pasis.Footnote 69 In a Pasi legend, there was a chaukidar (watchman), Mahiyan, who served the Raja of Newari.
One day, his pigs trespassed into the fields of a Murao, named Koeli. He proferred a complaint to that Raja and demanded nine lakhs of rupees as damages. The Raja offered him four lakhs, but he insisted, in addition, that Mahiyan should be banished from the kingdom. When Mahiyan was ordered to go into banishment, he refused and, summoning his caste men, defeated the army of the Raja; but he spared his life and compelled him to pay a fourth (Chauth) of his revenue to the Pasis.Footnote 70
It is significant that many poor and low-caste Muslims and pirs-fakirs (like Shaikh Sarna of Multan) did not shun pigs and Dalit pig-keepers (like Chuhra Bhangis, followers of Lal Beg). Though Shaikh Mehtars (Muslim sweepers) did not eat pork themselves, they continued to maintain contact with Lal Begis (Hindu sweepers/Chuhra Bhangis) in Banaras.Footnote 71 Khawaja Mansuri, a sub-caste of Muslim Dhuniyas, even reared domestic pigs. The Karwal of Hardoi were ‘a subcaste amongst the Aheriya, Baheliya, Bhangi, and Chamar castes’ that ate pork yet worshipped local Muslim Pirs-Fakirs (Jahar Pir of Agra, Zahir or Gugga Pir, Panch Pirs, Madar Sahib, and Ghazi Mian) ‘and occasionally Kali and the Ganges’.Footnote 72 Many Dalits worshipped pirs-fakirs, some offering young domestic pigs. In Bahraich, devotees offered a young domestic pig at the shrine of Aga Mecah, a Muslim saint.Footnote 73 In Jhansi, Kahars offered a domestic pig and wine to Amina Sati or Amina Bhawani, a local goddess. They visited her shrine to perform a collective ritual, for which, according to Crooke, they called a Dhimar, a Muslim, and a Khatik. A Muslim read kalma, an Islamic oath of allegiance, while sacrificing cattle, and a Khatik cleaned and prepared animal carcasses. After an offering to the goddess, the worshipper and his friends cooked and shared pork.Footnote 74
The sub-castes of Bhangis, Bhars, Chamars, Doms, Khatiks, Nats, Pasis, and other Dalits domesticated, tamed, reared, sold, sacrificed, and slaughtered pigs as a commodity (for bristle and meat) and also used them as offerings. In their bastis, they kept pigs for the bristle and pork business. They were also used for the celebration of births and marriages; success for pregnant women; the removal of barrenness; safe house construction; successful sowing and harvesting; the prevention of diseases, and the warding off of evil spirits (bhuts and jinns); not to mention their ability to facilitate the blessings of gods, goddesses, gurus, and ancestors of Dalit clans, castes, and villages.Footnote 75 For instance, a sweeper in western UP was the local priest of a spirit of Jakhaiya whose ‘offering was a young pig’. In Aligarh, Kanjars, Doms, and ‘Dhanuks (Aheriyas)’ worshipped Jakhiya ‘at the door of a sweeper’s hut’ and organised a public feast. Some believed Jakhaiya was the ghost of one Muhammadan Ghori. According to a folk story, he was a Bhangi warrior whose shrine was in Mainpuri.Footnote 76 ‘Goraiya was a Dosadh [Dusadh] bandit chief now widely worshipped, even by “clean” caste people. To him, the “unclean” sacrifice a pig, or several young pigs and pour spirits on the ground.’ ‘Salesh is the name of another famous robber whom Dosadhs worship, offering a pig’ with food and liquor.Footnote 77 According to Crooke, in Jaunpur or Mirzapur, Khatiks ‘worship the deified ghost of some unknown Brahman known as [Brahm], Bamat, Babhan or Brahman Deva. […] His offering is a Brahmanical thread (janeu), a pig, and a cup of liquor.’Footnote 78 This being, known among high castes as a brahmarakshasa, the ghost of a sinning Brahmin, is here incorporated into Dalit ritual through the sacrifice of an unclean animal, thereby countering Brahmin discourses of purity.
Crooke says Birtya Bhawani was ‘a demoness’, though for Khatiks, she was an ‘incarnation of Bhawani’ and ‘a patron deity of cows and buffaloes’. Khatiks worshipped her ‘with a sacrifice of a pig on the occasion of purchase of a bullock or when a cow gives birth to a calf’.Footnote 79 Khatiks sacrificed a pig in the name of Birtiya Bir—a demon of ‘sickness or other trouble’—and Shitala Mai, after recovering from smallpox.Footnote 80 Chamars sacrificed pigs annually to worship ‘Purbi Deota (the deity of the east)’ at home, along with local deities: Shitala, Masani, Chamariya, Saliya, Jakhaiya, etc.Footnote 81 Chamar widows sacrificed pigs to worship the spirit of deceased husbands—‘manushya deva’, or man-god.Footnote 82
‘Jallad and scavenger Domes who catch dogs’ offered young pigs and liquor to ‘Kukar Mari’ (dog-killer or dog goddess/guardian) outside villages. During feasts for childbirth, Doms sacrificed pigs to Dhargoraya (ancestor at the door). ‘After the feast, the bones of the head are buried under the door-sill.’ ‘The new [Dom] husband of a [Dom] divorcee’ gave a community feast and served pork before his marriage. Among Beriya Doms, the groom’s family often gave a pig, a silver ring, and a pot of liquor as marriage gifts to the bride’s family. After death feasts, Doms offered pork, water, and liquor to the deceased person’s spirit.Footnote 83 Shilpkars and hill Doms of Garhwal often organised community feasts and served pork to their caste fellows (biradari) as a death ritual, and in honour of Nirankar—the ‘principal god of the hill Doms’.Footnote 84
Eating pork symbolised manhood for the ‘Byar, Ghasiya and Kol’ castes.Footnote 85 Bhars considered a ‘pig or an ass […] as a lucky meeting omen’. The Majhwar/Manjhi kept pig bones in their houses. Nats often swore ‘by holding a pig’s tail at the shrine of their deity’.Footnote 86 Doms supplied ‘pigs on the part of devil priests of other castes who have a clientele among caste and out-caste alike’.Footnote 87 Dukar Kolhatis (a sub-caste of Nats/Doms) were hired by villagers to kill wild hogs. Their males were ‘a fine manly set of fellows, and obtain[ed] the distinction of Dukar, “hog”, from the fact of their hunting the wild, and breeding the domesticated pigs’. Hence, Kolhatis were known as Suarwala (hunters and breeders of pigs).Footnote 88 This suggests that dealing with wild, semi-wild, and domestic pigs were Dalit professions.
Crooke notes that Shudras (Mallahs, Nais, Lodhs, Kurmis, Telis, Kahars, etc.) sacrificed domestic pigs as offerings to local deities for good health. Like Bhangis and Kanjars, Lodh women offered pigs to worship Jakhaiya.Footnote 89 Unlike them, Jats and Banjaras ate only wild pigs,Footnote 90 as did Rajputs and Sikhs in UP and other parts of North India.Footnote 91 However, John Lockwood Kipling notes an interesting point with reference to caste Hindus and domestic pigs. He says that ‘there is little that can be quoted against [tame pigs] from [Hindu and Muslim] sacred lore. Like the donkey, his low caste makes him suitable for association with disease godlings and demons. A pious Hindu who has recovered from smallpox buys a pig and lets it loose to Shitala or he will be again attacked.’Footnote 92 Thus, upper-caste Hindus surrendered to Dalit power, using pigs to appease Shitala.Footnote 93
This review of domestic pigs in the everyday lives of Dalits demonstrates how they served both as a source of economic sustenance and also as symbols of silent Dalit resistance and power. Through rituals involving pigs, Dalits resisted Brahmanical socio-cultural politics. In the next section, we will study Dalit pig-breeders, bristle traders, meat-sellers, and those who laboured and ate pork, along with Dalit tenants and agrarian labourers, united in Dalit solidarity. This is most palpable in their support and solidarity with the rising Dalit movement and constitutional politics under Ambedkar in the late 1920s and 1930s.
Pigs, Dalits, and Ambedkar’s movement
In the name of Achhutoddhar, vegetarianism, and reforms from the 1920s to the 1940s, Hindi-Hindu associations, writers, and high-caste HSS Gandhians had spread their caste–communal politics to mobilise Rajputising Dalits against Dalit pig-breeders, those who ate and sold pork and beef, bristle/leather-dealers, and landless labourers, as noted above. Consequently, the Hinduised Dalits—Rajbhars, Suryavanshi Khatiks, Jatav Rajputs, Arya Samaji Shilpkars, Arya Samaji Pasis, Awadhi Chuhras, Valmiki Bhangis, etc.—discriminated against Dalit pig-breeders and pork-eaters—Khuntait Bhars, Sonkar Khatiks, Jhusiya and Pharriaiya Chamars, Kaithwasi Pasis, Chuhra Bhangis, Dom pig-breeders, etc.—socially and culturally, and started offering vegetarian food in their rituals. Some preferred goat-rearing as a livelihood.Footnote 94
Therefore, between the late 1920s and the 1940s, the boycotted Dalits, along with Dalit cattle traders, leather-workers, tanners, agrarian labourers, and tenants, mobilised for a new movement under Ambedkar’s leadership. They rallied to protect their everyday lives in which pigs existed, rejecting vegetarianism and the Achhutoddhar of high-caste Gandhians and Hindi-Hindu agencies. Ambedkar was a critic of the Brahminical discourse of untouchability and caste–communal politics around pig, pork, cow, beef, vegetarianism, and Achhutoddhar.Footnote 95 He noted a case where some Dalits ‘passed a resolution supporting [the] abandonment of bad habits and to take to a clean mode of life. Some of the caste Hindus did not like the idea. They killed one small pig and put it into the drinking water of the Depressed Class people [or Dalits]. This process was repeated twice. The Depressed Class people are now socially boycotted and harassed. Many of the Depressed Class people have vacated their places due to harassment.’Footnote 96 In the Brahmins’ minds, Ambedkar wrote, ‘If a Brahman dies with the food of a Shudra in his stomach, he will become a village pig [in his next life] or be born in the family of that Shudra.’ He exposed Brahmanical legends, manipulations, and caste–communal politics.Footnote 97 According to Ambedkar, some caste Hindus forced Dalits to abandon pigs and pork in the name of reform and vegetarianism, and many forced Dalits to live with untouchability in the name of tradition.
It is important to add that while promoting social reforms, education, and Dalit Bhakti saints’ ideas between 1912 and 1922, Swami Achhutanand discouraged unclean occupations (gande pesho), eating the rotten flesh of dead animals (mritak pashuo ke sade mans), unpaid labour (begari), midwifery (sat basana: the practice of taking care of newborn babies and mothers for seven days), drinking, and superstition.Footnote 98 These recommendations were only partly accepted by his Dalit followers, who depended on the breeding animals (including pigs), selling (and eating) the fresh meat of slaughtered animals, and bristle/leather-related occupations. On the other hand, unlike the vegetarianism of Gandhi and Hindi-Hindu agencies, Ambedkar legitimated the eating of the flesh of slaughtered animals and animal-related occupations, by drawing examples from Buddhism and ancient history, and attending a public feast in the basti of Khatik pig-breeders and bristle-sellers in Kanpur.Footnote 99 Between the late 1920s and the 1940s, Ambedkar attracted many Dalit pig-breeders, pork and beef-eaters, sellers of bristle, leather, pork and beef, as well as landless labourers, who were denied equal rights in public places and institutions as well as jobs in the army, police, and chaukidari forces.Footnote 100
From the late 1920s, many Adi-Hindu leaders and Dalits started joining Ambedkar’s movement for civil and human rights with Swami Achhutanand, and had accepted Ambedkar as a national Dalit leader by the Round Table Conference (RTC) in the early 1930s. For instance, Rai Saheb Babu Ram Sahai Pasi, a plumber and contractor, was a leader of Pasi and Dalit labourers, pig-breeders, pork-eaters, bristle- and leather-sellers, tenants, etc.Footnote 101 He was elected joint secretary of the All India Working Committee of the All India Depressed Classes Congress held on 7–8 May 1932 at Kamathi (Nagpur), where Ambedkar, Achhutanand, and others addressed the Dalit public. With Rettamalai Srinivasan (from Madras), Ambedkar was nominated as a Dalit representative for the RTC.Footnote 102 In March–April 1932, Ram Sahai was a member of the UP Provincial Franchise Committee and represented Dalits before the Indian Franchise Committee (IFC) as a representative of the UP Adi-Hindu Depressed Classes Association. He defined the depressed classes in terms of untouchability and its everyday manifestations. In April 1932, he told the IFC: ‘Everywhere in the province, they [Dalits] live segregated in mohallas termed as “Chamrauti”, “Pasiana”, “Koriana”, “Khatkana” [or Khatikan], etc.’
[T]echnically a Hindu member of the depressed classes cannot venture to enter into the precincts of the Bishwantji [Vishwanath] temple at Benares or of any thakurdwara anywhere in the province. He cannot bathe on the ghats at Benares, which are under the control of the municipal board, nor can he draw water from the municipal wells in that place.
He added, ‘Caste fury assumed a grave aspect when an untouchable woman was discovered walking in the streets of that holy city. The offended Hindus belaboured her most mercilessly.’Footnote 103 The IFC recorded that, for a Brahman, ‘the keeping of pigs, or the eating of unclean food, such as pork or beef’ and the ‘following of some unclean profession’ were the reasons for untouchability.Footnote 104 This bares the politics of unclean occupations—leather-work and pig-related occupations—and unclean food: pork and beef.
Following the IFC’s suggestions, the UP government prepared ‘the list of Scheduled Castes in March 1933, [which included] over fifty caste groups in UP’.Footnote 105 But the Khatiks were listed as a Depressed Class. Hence, in April 1933, the UP Khatik Conference, with Bhai Karori Mal from Kanpur as president, made a request to the UP government that ‘the Khatiks community be included in the list of Scheduled Castes of Appendix VIII of the “White Paper”’:
being economically poor and educationally backward, we are socially ostracised in the society of the high-caste Hindus. We are admittedly untouchables in the United Provinces. Food and water touched by the Khatiks are not taken by high-caste Hindus as they are regarded [as] unclean. The chief profession of the Khatiks [is] keeping […] pigs and fowl in the rural areas and dealing [with] Ham and Bacon, Fowl and Eggs in the towns. We are not allowed to enter the Temple as we are regarded as untouchable.Footnote 106
Babu Ram Sahai Pasi supported these demands. On 4 April 1933, he presided over a public meeting of Khatiks in Lucknow, demanding their inclusion ‘in the list of Scheduled Castes’.Footnote 107
Time and again, Hindi-Hindu associations attacked Dalit pig-breeders, and sellers and eaters of pork—pushing Dalits towards Ambedkar’s movement. For example, Ramlal Sonkar (1912–1952), a Khatik, was the son of a pig-breeder. His father sold pig, pork and bristles in Rae Bareilly. His family migrated to Kanpur, the hub of the leather and bristle industries. After receiving some education, he joined the family business and became a successful bristle trader, cultivating contacts with European companies and merchants. After serving Swami Achhutanand’s Adi-Hindu movement, Sonkar joined Ambedkar’s Dalit movement and became the president of the Kanpur Scheduled Caste Federation. He was a leader of Dalit pig-breeders, bristle/leather-traders, pork-sellers, and labourers of Kanpur and neighbouring districts in the late 1930s and 1940s. As noted above, in December 1943, Vartman published an article against Kanpur’s Dalit bastis by calling them suarbaade.Footnote 108 Sonkar protested by inviting Ambedkar to a Khatik basti for a Dalit public feast (sahbhoj) at Latouche Road in January 1944. Kabirpanthis and other Dalits attended. A sweeper (Valmiki) cooked and served simple food (roti, dal, rice, papad, curd, etc.). On this occasion, Ambedkar urged Dalits to remove restrictions on intermarriage and commensality. Sonkar also claimed civil-human rights and social equality with other Dalits through a feast.Footnote 109 In public meetings, he criticised conservative Hindus who ostracised Dalits. He accepted Ambedkar as the sole political leader of Dalits and demanded separate representation and civil rights for Dalits in 1943.Footnote 110
It is obvious that association with impure animals, foods, and occupations relating to them was a direct reason for upper-caste Hindu to deny Dalits entry into public sites, jobs in the army, police and chaukidari forces, and equal wages. Everyday caste politics stretched across Hindi-Hindu associations and the Hinduised Dalits on the one hand and Adi-Hindus and Ambedkarist Dalits on the other. I argue that such Dalit activism, like inviting Ambedkar to a pig-breeders’ feast, holding meetings, and informing the government about their issues, was a significant transformation from silent resistance to constitutional protest against the caste–communal politics of orthodox Muslims, Hindus, and Hinduising Dalits. Like Dalit writer Omprakash Valmiki, Babu Ram Sahai Pasi and Ramlal Sonkar transformed themselves from exploited Dalits to members of Ambedkar’s movement. They supplemented silent, everyday Dalit resistance by raising Dalit issues on public platforms.Footnote 111 While silent resistance continued, Ambedkar’s movement fought for Dalits’ political representation and everyday freedoms of equality; dignity of labour; food, occupation, and water; access to public and religious spaces; education; etc. This article has argued that pigs were part of this complex life and struggle.
Conclusion
Pigs played an important role in everyday life for Dalits, economically, socially, and ritually. The importance of pigs was not an autonomous and hermetically sealed social fact but was deeply related to caste hierarchy. In everyday life, pigs helped generate the power of impurity against the discourse of untouchability and purity. They were weapons of the weak and served to raise socio-political consciousness.Footnote 112 For Ambedkarist Dalits, pigs symbolised power and resistance because the nurturing of domestic and semi-wild pigs pushed against the established ideas of orthodox Hindus and Muslims, Hinduising Dalits, and the colonial ruling elite. Through offerings to some liberal pirs-fakirs, pigs also forged solidarity between Dalits and some Muslims groups.
After independence, the Nehruvian state and its artists started secularising popular images circulated by the Hindi-Hindu institutions to unite Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs. For instance, they replaced the image of the controversial cow (‘chaurasi dev darshan’ wali gai) with the image of a secular cow (gau mata: ‘jagat mata’, ‘kamdhenu’), which was thought to be a symbol of unity in diversity.Footnote 113 However, the Nehruvian state failed to abolish the caste–communal politics of upper-caste Hindu Congress workers and Hindi-Hindu associations, who, from the 1950s onwards, ignored and marginalised domestic pigs, Dalit issues, and Ambedkar. Like mainstream historians, nationalist artists also ignored them. They never accepted Ambedkar as a symbol of unity, equality, friendship, brotherhood, and secularism in national politics, the social domain, popular culture, and Indian history. The pig remains both an outcaste animal and a weapon of the weak.
Acknowledgement
I dedicate this article to Dr Rohit Vamula
Conflicts of interest
None.
