Marathi Samājvād: Caste, Secularism, and Socialist Ethics in Postcolonial India

Using a range of bilingual literary and archival materials, my paper traces the efforts of Marathi-speaking socialist political leaders, social reformers, and intellectuals to translate ‘democratic socialism’ into a vernacular samājvād by stitching resources from different contexts—inter-war global socialist literature, Gandhian teaching, and Maharashtrian social reform—into new and creative political vocabularies. My account of these efforts is centered on the Rashtra Seva Dal, a socialist volunteer organization— and its affiliate organizations such as the publishing house Sadhana Prakashan— which emerged in the 1950s as a central node connecting the intellectual, literary, and political realms of Marathi samājvād. Using an archive of RSD’s pamphlets, song books, and the pioneering Marathi socialist journal Sadhana, this paper explores how socialist political imaginaries wove linguistic, caste, and religious identities into new relationships. The project of samatā (equality) was translated into a fight against jātiyatā or an excessive attachment to sectarian identities. Cognizant of the long history of anti-caste movements in Maharashtra since the late 19th century, Marathi socialists searched for means to weave anti-caste social reform into their vision of a socialist democratic politics.Their critique of jātiyatā linked samājvād to Gandhian satyagraha, using an eclectic set of socialist ideals derived from the Gandhian Vinobha Bhave’s bhoodan, Swedish social democracy, and Phuleite social reform. Using these resources, Marathi socialists tried to refashion samājvād into a secular ethic. As I argue in the paper, this new discourse of ethics helped transcode the upper-caste habitus of socialist elites into a new language of secular democracy, while justifying the continued use of caste-inflected cultural vocabularies of social reform. In the end, both the desire, and the failure to produce a social theory for samājvād, were born out of socialists’ attempt to reconcile the contradictory ideals of upper-caste reform and non-Brahmin and Dalit social critique.