What if the real builders of Indian civilisation never got to write the story?

In The Shudra Rebellion, the political theorist and Dalit rights activist Professor Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd attempts what few historians have done: he critiques Indian culture and civilisation by applying a new methodology that onboards the historically marginalised Shudras, who constitute both India’s productive labour and its numerical majority, into the mainstream narrative.

He brings the issue into the present by identifying the 2020-21 farmers’ agitation in Delhi as “the first ever major successful rebellion of Shudra collective consciousness”. According to Ilaiah, the farmers’ agitation “stands as an unprecedented movement against the monopolisitic ambitions of bania conglomerates to seize control of Shudra agrarian economy through the farm laws enacted by the RSS/BJP government in Delhi.” In this book, Ilaiah questions the idea that Indian civilisation began “with the writing of the Vedas”.

Historians and intellectuals have not challenged this “false picture” of dwijas (“twice-born” Brahmins) as builders of Indian civilisation. He suggests that the knowledge of production processes and the natural world in the Dalit/Shudra experience was not written down owing to the caste-based denial of access to language and learning.

Ilaiah states that Mahatma Jyotirao Phule (1827-90) was the first Shudra thinker who also wrote. Phule learnt English in a missionary-run school, read Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, and critiqued the Brahminical social order. Dr B.R. Ambedkar (1869-1956) later followed in Phule’s footsteps. Contrasting the “spade civilisation” of the Shudras with the “book civilisation” of the Brahmins, Ilaiah opines that these books say nothing of the skilled lives of the Shudras.

The “spade civilisation”

While the Shudra productive process involved passing on knowledge and skills acquired through practical work, Brahminical teaching made youngsters memorise already existing theory with little innovation. Shudras continued to produce, distribute, and innovate on all the necessities of human life but were denied literacy and thus prevented from documenting their production processes and knowledge.

Their innovations remained an untold story in the history of the Harappan civilisation, with its highly evolved civic infrastructure, the manufacturing of bricks for construction, the making of clay pottery and beads, agriculture, and even a form of script-based language which has yet to be decoded. Thus, a people who had built a large, technologically competent and complex culture were forced out of spirituality, politics, and the intellectual arena and relegated to being mere followers of Brahminical forces.

Ilaiah indicts the Brahmins’ “controlled cognition” of the Shudras for the profound negative impact upon their past, present, and future. The Brahminical theory equated production with pollution and considered soil untouchable, hence exempted the “spiritually pure” Brahmin from any field-based manual labour. He cites Kautilya’s Arthashastra to show how the four varnas were allocated roles in society and were expected to “devotedly adhere to their respective duties and occupations”, with the promise of svarga (heaven) if one followed it and the threat of “the world coming to an end” if one did not. This ideology subjugated even kings to the Brahmin, who became the source of political, social, economic, and religious/spiritual power.

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Ilaiah also shows how Buddhism influenced kings until the 3rd century CE, causing Brahmins to be kept out of the state structure. But after Kautilya wrote the Arthashastra, he systematically planned the overthrow of the Nanda dynasty and set up the Shudra Chandragupta Maurya, whom he controlled. After this, Brahminical control over priesthood and the state was well established and continues in some form to the present.

In one of the chapters, Ilaiah discusses how Dalits were separated from Shudras, although this had not been the case earlier, and how those who worked with leather were forced into untouchability and permanent slavery as caste ideology took hold. While their engagement with the environment made the Shudras scientific and practical, the unscientific Brahminical idea that leather was polluting was detrimental to agrarian activities and prevented its use for a number of productive activities, including writing.

The ancient books of the Jews, Greeks, Chinese, and Egyptians were written on leather and have been preserved for centuries on scrolls; Indian manuscripts, which were written on palm leaves, have not survived as well. Leather workers were stigmatised and denied literacy. Over time, castes evolved into complex groups with elaborate superstitions governing social interactions.

Ilaiah strongly believes that only a Shudra rebellion for the democratisation of language will “rekindle life in this nation”. | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

Ilaiah also unpacks the idea of how god operated among Shudras, Brahmins, and Jews. The Jewish god was an abstraction, a creator of the universe and the first humans, without nation, colour, caste, or creed. He worked for six days on the task of creation and rested on the seventh day. Thus, work was not only valued but was a fulfilling part of life, giving it meaning and purpose.

According to the Brahminical imagination, Brahma was god, Indian by nationality and of the Aryan race. Humans were created out of various parts of his body, with an implied hierarchy, the “highest” being the head/mouth (Brahmins) and the lowest being the legs (Shudras). Considered divine because they were created from the Creator’s head, Brahmins were exempted from work. In contrast to the Jewish system, work in the Vedic system was imposed as slavery so that the three varnas “above” the Shudras could enjoy more leisure and quality of life while the workers were exploited and lost dignity, agency, and remuneration for their work. There was no recognition of their intelligence and innovation.

Ilaiah contrasts this with the pre-Vedic work-based spiritual philosophy of the Harappans, who built a great civilisation based on land and animal economy. However, this civilisation did not survive the arrival of the Aryans, who discarded the work-based Harappan world view, relegated them to slavery, and erased their history. To this day, only a few samples of their written language/communication system, based on symbols, have survived, but it has not been deciphered yet.

In the later chapters, Ilaiah expands upon the Chinese philosophical school of agriculturalism, which flourished between 770 BCE and 221 CE and encouraged people to build skills in farming, woodwork, metal work, and leather processing. Even the influential Confucianism was not able to damage the material knowledge base of China’s people. By contrast, Brahminism in India treated farmers and pastoralists as untouchable and spiritually inferior; the Shudras could not counter this and thus lost their “philosophically respectable” status.

Ilaiah devotes the final chapters to tracing how the technically competent Shudras, with their production and scientific skills, were denied access to language, reading, and writing skills. This curtailed the expression of their critical thinking and philosophical skills.

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The Brahmins also caused a separation of the spoken language from the “prayer” language, retaining Sanskrit for prayer and mantras but using Shudra languages for day-to-day communication even among themselves, effectively locking others out of even functional access to their own languages.

Ilaiah strongly believes that only a Shudra rebellion for the democratisation of language will “rekindle life in this nation”. He asserts that the Shudras’ philosophy—based on their interaction with the soil, plants, air, sunlight, and the natural rhythms of life—makes their spirituality a combination of science and god. Brahminical philosophical enquiry, on the other hand, deals with abstractions and mythical ideas that negate the Shudra scientific spiritual consciousness and rob it of the “capacity to reason out the process of life”, even triggering the decline of Indian agrarian and artisanal science.

Ilaiah argues that the remedy lies in the widespread study of English, especially among Dalits and Shudras, the development of a Shudra intellectual movement, and the rewriting of Indian history from the Shudra perspective. He calls for Shudra thinkers to bring a new approach to their historiography that focusses on the documentation of what remains of the production knowledge of the oldest civilisation of the world. 

Cynthia Stephen is an independent journalist and social policy researcher who works in the areas of Dalit studies, affirmative action, and educational policy.