Opinion The story of Kamala Harris, caste and an Indian law few know about

On April 16, 1924, the Bombay-based Times of India reproduced the text of Veerian’s long telegram, under the headline: ‘A Madras MLC’s Complaint: Intolerable Brahmin Tyranny’. In Veerian’s telling of the incident, he intended merely to pass through the “Agraharam public pathway” in Kamalapuram “in order to post letters” at a post office located there and “see” a school in the same vicinity. But “owing to Panchama pollution” (“untouchability”), a Brahmin identified as Monigar Rungier, the village munsif, blocked Veerian’s entry into that street. It mattered little to that Brahmin official that there was, as Veerian put it, “no other way except passing through Agraharam” to reach the post office or the school.

This episode of “untouchability” triggered a chain of events, including a resolution that was adopted by the Madras legislature on August 22, 1924. The failure of this resolution to make any difference on the ground prompted Veerian to up the ante with a bill outlawing “untouchability”. Given the odds stacked against any Private Member Bill, its journey began with a strategic choice made by Veerian to slip in his anti-untouchability provisions under the guise of amendments to an existing civic law. Even so, to garner support from a legislature dominated by caste Hindus, it took a lot of negotiations and compromises. So much so that when the Bill was discussed for the first time on December 14, 1925, Veerian felt constrained to begin his address with conciliatory noises. “I beg to submit that I am not going to bring in the subject of caste nor am I going to raise the problem of untouchability in relation to caste.” That he had to disclaim what was so visibly the point of his initiative was a measure of the pressure he was under.

The Select Committee that had been set up for the Bill deleted a clause empowering all classes to access public sources of water. The ambit of the Bill was thus reduced to the relatively less sensitive issues of throwing open public roads and markets to Dalits. When the Madras legislature passed the Bill on August 31, 1926, Veerian was instrumental in the enactment of the first-ever law anywhere in the country against untouchability. Indeed, the Madras Local Boards Amendment Act 1926 marked a civilisational breakthrough. It outlawed exclusionary practices that had for generations been considered by caste Hindus as a pious obligation to preserve their purity. Besides criminalising untouchability, it prescribed penalties — even if they were only monetary fines. The press contemporaneously noticed the significance of this law enforceable across the rural areas of the Madras Presidency. Praising him for driving home “the social tyranny of the higher castes”, the Times of India said: “Mr Veerian deserves credit for drawing attention to the matter and the legislative enactment, which he has succeeded in piloting through the Council, should go a long way to remove many of the social disabilities of his Adi Dravida brethren.”

Irrespective of the extent to which it removed the social disabilities of the untouchables in the Madras Presidency, the pioneering contribution of the 1926 Veerian legislation went unnoticed in history. This was despite the fact that it inspired another Dalit legislator in another province, G A Gavai in Central Provinces (which encompassed parts of today’s Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh), to get a similar law enacted in 1933. Instead, in the spirit of history being written by the victors, the credit for breaking ground on untouchability has been given to a leader from the Brahmin community, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari or Rajaji, the legendary associate of Mahatma Gandhi. It was on his watch as Premier of the Madras Presidency that in 1938, a full 12 years after Veerian’s legislation, came what is commonly presented as a trailblazer.

The erasure of the Veerian and Gavai precedents helped historians sidestep one major deficiency in Rajaji’s enactment. Whereas the Veerian and Gavai laws criminalised “untouchability”, the Rajaji law was merely declaratory with no penal consequences flowing from it. The Rajaji law just declared that no court would recognise any custom or usage perpetuating “untouchability”. Since it did not, however, define any offence, there was no question of any punishment. Thus, far from building on the precedents set by little-known Dalits, the law that was valorised by historians, the Madras Removal of Civil Disabilities Act, 1938, was conceptually retrograde. The unicameral provincial legislature had by then given way to a bicameral system in the Madras Presidency. After the Legislative Assembly had passed the Bill on August 17, 1938, the Legislative Council did the same on December 12, 1938, after a dramatic debate that recalled the Veerian milestone. It was by J A Saldanha who had, in 1929, followed up on the Veerian law with a similar one for the urban areas of the Madras Presidency. He pointed out that in the Bill that had been “brought forward by Mr Veerian”, there was a clause “prescribing a penalty for the infringement of the rights laid down.”

By contrast, in the Bill introduced by the Rajaji government, he lamented, “there is no provision for punishing a man who prevents the enjoyment of any of these privileges”. Incidentally, five days prior to this debate, Shyamala Gopalan was born not too far from the legislative building in the same Madras city.

Mitta is the author of Caste Pride: Battles for Equality in Hindu India