The prolonged disquiet over Patel’s bill among Hindus raised concerns about it in the British Parliament. On 6 August 1919, Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Col. Charles Yate asked Secretary of State for India Edwin Montagu whether he was aware that the introduction and circulation of what he called the ‘Patel Hindu Inter Caste Marriage Bill’ had caused ‘great alarm amongst orthodox Hindus’. Yate, who had been a colonial administrator in India, said that the bill had been seen by such Hindus as ‘an interference with their most sacred religious and social usages which it has been the policy of the British Government hitherto never to interfere with’.
Montagu played it safe by saying that Yate’s question was based on ‘some misapprehension’, clarifying: ‘The Government of India is not responsible for the Bill, which was introduced by an elected member of the Legislative Council. The Government are in no way committed to support it, but as it received a certain amount of support from the unofficial members, they have taken steps to obtain the full opinion of the Hindu community before the Bill is further proceeded with.’
Though ‘the full opinion of the Hindu community’ was received by then, it took another six months for the bill to be discussed before the Imperial Legislative Council. The discussion happened on 25 February 1920, following a motion moved by Patel to refer the bill to a Select Committee as the next step in the legislative process. The government had by then prepared a thirty-five-page ‘Precis of Opinions on the Hindu Marriages Validity Bill’.
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That a substantial section of opinions, including that of Chandavarkar, turned out to be favourable to the bill gave Patel the confidence to address the issue of pratiloma marriages, which he had sidestepped in the previous round of discussion. He readily conceded that the scriptures disapproved of it. Though anuloma marriages were ‘admittedly permitted’, Patel said that pratiloma marriages were ‘condemned by the Hindu Shastras’. But, echoing Chandavarkar’s revised view, he clarified that ‘such condemnation was, according to the best authorities, merely moral’.
On the strength of this fine distinction between what was considered merely immoral and what was legally invalidated, Patel asserted, ‘There is no text on Hindu law which can be cited to prove that Pratiloma marriages were illegal and the issues of such marriages illegitimate.’ Based on this reading of the Shastras, he claimed reassuringly that his bill followed ‘the line of least resistance’ as it retained the sacramental character of the Hindu marriage and did not engraft ‘any new principle not sanctioned by Hindus’.
But more than his interpretation of the Shastras, it was Patel’s analysis of public opinion on the bill that proved contentious. Though the proportion of adverse opinions was greater, Patel claimed that ‘a great majority of the Hindu community, numerically speaking, is in my favour’. The basis of his claim was that most Hindus were Shudras.
Given that his own caste of Leuva Patel Patidars had Shudra status, it was not unnatural for him to break down the feedback from the perspective of the varna that was stigmatised, despite being numerically the largest by a long margin. Patel began by saying, ‘I may say at once that the whole community of my Sudra brothers and sisters is entirely in favour of this Bill.’ On second thoughts, he claimed that the support base of his bill extended to ‘the entire non-Brahmin community’, which included Kshatriyas and Vaishyas.
As for the varna that was meant to be protected the most from mixed marriages, Patel agreed that ‘the majority of the Brahmins is against my Bill’. Despite his disclaimer that he did not ‘wish to lead any attack on any particular community’, he said: ‘I quite realise that it is only human nature that one who is in possession of power does not like to part with it so easily.’
Presenting a province-wise breakdown of the feedback from Brahmins, Patel said, ‘When I say that the opposition mainly comes from one community, I am bound to give this Council some proof in support of this sweeping statement.’ Though the bulk of his speech had been devoted to substantiating that claim, Patel concluded, ‘I trust my Brahmin friends will excuse me if I have said anything to offend them. I have said what I have felt.’
Before any of them could respond to Patel’s unusual attack on their community, Home Member William Vincent contested his claim that the opinions on the bill were polarised between Brahmins and non-Brahmins. Vincent denied that Patel was ‘correct in his attack on Brahmins as the real opponents of this measure’. He said the Council was being asked ‘to neglect public opinion as voiced by Brahmins’, and instead ‘be guided by the opinions of the silent millions’. Vincent found that Patel’s attitude departed from the default position of Indian leaders that ‘there is one opinion in India and that is the vocal opinion of the educated classes’.
Even apart from ‘the justice of this attack on the Brahmins’, Vincent counselled that Patel should have ‘avoided it as a matter of tactics’. For, in his experience of the Council, ‘many of the acutest Indian intellects have always been Brahmins’. Vincent recalled that when he had once ‘said a word about Brahmins’ in the Council, it ‘brought a storm about my ears’ and he ‘avoided doing so again’. Vincent warned Patel that his attack on Brahmins was ‘the most dangerous hornet’s nest he has ever disturbed’. It was an astute portrayal of the Brahmanical grip over the Indian elite. ‘If there is one thing which Hindu members in this Council will not bear, it is any suspicion of what they think is an unfair attack upon the Brahmin community.’
Whatever other Hindu members of the Council might have thought about it, Brahmin legislators certainly showed signs of resenting Patel’s attack on their community. One of them was Surendra Nath Banerjea, who spoke at length on the Brahmin issue when the discussion on the bill resumed the following day, on 26 February 1920.
Echoing Vincent’s reaction, Banerjea affirmed that ‘apart from the inaccuracy of his statements’, Patel was ‘guilty of a gigantic blunder’, for his speech which was ‘so full of anti-Brahmanical spirit’. Referring to the history of Brahmins propelling social reforms, Banerjea said, ‘It serves no useful purpose to alienate the sympathies of the intellectual leaders of India.’
Banerjea’s reaction prompted George Lowndes—now vice president of the Council, presiding over the proceedings in the absence of Viceroy Chelmsford—to intervene: ‘I had hoped that after the adjournment yesterday the Council would have agreed to bury the Brahmin question; sufficient has already been said on both sides, and the matter is really quite irrelevant. The motion before the Council is whether the Bill should be referred to a Select Committee or not, and I propose to rule in future that all references to the Brahmin question are out of order.’
The embargo was tested more than once in the course of the debate that day. When Rangaswamy Ayyangar, for instance, faulted Patel for construing the feedback as though ‘Brahmins alone’ had opposed the bill, Lowndes cut in, ‘Order, order, I will not allow the Hon’ble Member to go into the Brahmin question.’ Ayyangar protested that, since Patel had ‘based his arguments on this point that the majority of the non-Brahmins support his Bill’, he should be allowed ‘to meet them’. Lowndes, however, did not relent: ‘The Hon’ble Member must obey my ruling; he must either obey my ruling or resume his seat.’
Patel himself returned to the Brahmin question, obliquely this time, when he made his closing remarks. He said, ‘My Hon’ble friend Mr Banerjea thinks that I made a tactical blunder … in criticising a certain section of the community. Well, I plead guilty to the charge. Perhaps I did make a tactical blunder.
However, he was ‘not prepared under any circumstances’ to accept Banerjea’s proposition that ‘the great majority of Hindus are not in favour of the Bill’. He reaffirmed the three conclusions that he drew ‘from the heap of materials placed before this Council’: that most Shudras supported his bill, that most non-Brahmins (the larger category that included Shudras) too supported it and that most Brahmins (the smallest category) were against it.
Placing his bill in the larger scheme of things, Patel recalled the 1918 Montagu–Chelmsford Report, which had laid out the road map to ‘the attainment of responsible government’. Since caste had been adduced by the report as ‘one of the obstacles’ to that goal, Patel urged the Chelmsford administration to shed its neutral attitude in the little time that was left of the existing legislature’s tenure. ‘Is it really not your duty to help those of us who want gradually to get rid of these obstacles?’
This excerpt from Manoj Mitta’s ‘Caste Pride: Battle for Equality in Hindu India’ has been published with permission from Westland Books.