Mumbai: Activist Manoj Jarange Patil has ended his fast and given the Eknath Shinde-led Maharashtra government till 2 January to find a way to grant reservation in government jobs and education to the Maratha community.
Patil, who has been at the forefront of the agitation for the past four months, has been demanding that all Marathas be considered as Kunbis and be granted reservation. Kunbi is a caste among the Other Backward Classes (OBC) and gets reservation under the OBC quota.
The issue of granting a separate quota for the Maratha community is in the Supreme Court. The apex court had, in 2021, declared the Maharashtra government’s quota for the Maratha community unconstitutional. The state government filed a review petition and then a curative petition.
With the battle for a separate quota stuck in court, the only way for the Maratha community to get immediate benefits of reservation is by being considered as Kunbis, protestors say.
For now, the Eknath Shinde-led Maharashtra government has decided to issue caste certificates to eligible members of the Maratha community from before Maharashtra came into existence as a state, paving the way for these persons to get reservation as OBC.
Last week, Shinde announced that a government-appointed committee has scrutinised 1.72 crore old documents and found 11,530 had evidence to support Kunbi eligibility.
However, the decision has been met with some resistance from OBCs who see it as an encroachment on their quota.
The Maratha caste originated from the Kunbi fold, and all Marathas were originally Kunbis, leaders from the Maratha community as well as historians say. However, there’s also an argument that Marathas evolved as a different warrior caste, proud of their Rajput lineage.
ThePrint explains their connected lineage.
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Origin of words Kunbi & Maratha
Kunbi was a term used for the agrarian community, and over time, crystallised into different castes based on one’s occupation — sutar (carpenter), kumbhar (potter), lohar (coppersmith) and so on, according to some historians. By that definition, the Marathas too were originally Kunbi, they say.
“The word Kunbi comes from various terms that were used for the agrarian community — Kulwadi, Kunbawa, Kunbi, Kolanbi. The castes evolved according to occupation. The Marathas too are originally Kunbi. There’s very little documentation about this in the pre-British era,” Indrajeet Sawant, a historian who has studied the Kunbi-Maratha dynamic, told ThePrint.
According to Sawant, the census reports from the British era have mostly counted Marathas and Kunbis as part of the same caste.
However, besides the Mandal Commission report, the National Commission for Backward Classes report of 2000 rejected the demand for the Maratha community to be included in OBCs. In 2008, the Maharashtra State Backward Class Commission called the Marathas an economically and politically forward class.
Speaking to ThePrint, Pravin Gaikwad of the Sambhaji Brigade, one of the organisations that has been at the forefront of the demand for a Maratha quota, said the term Maratha dates back to the Satavahana dynasty with different references to it such as Maharatta and Maratha.
The Satvahana dynasty extended across the present day Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Maharashtra. The dynasty ruled for four-and-a-half centuries from about 230 BC, according to the central government’s Capacity Building Commission.
“Maratha is a pradesh vachak word (describing a region). That is why, it features in the national anthem, there was a Maratha battalion of the British, Bal Gangadhar Tilak named his paper Maratha,” said Gaikwad.
Maratha caste
The distinction between Marathas and Kunbis became evident when the former started contesting wars, giving birth to the idea that they are a different warrior caste. This is when the Marathas started seeking lineage with other warrior groups such as the Rajputs.
A paper titled ‘Political Economy of the Dominant Caste,’ authored by Rajeshwari Deshpande and Suhas Palshikar, says that the history of Maharashtra shows a close interaction between Marathas and Kunbis at various levels where the former claimed a Kshatriya rank, while the latter were cultivators and remained within the Shudra fold.
“Sections of Kunbis, especially from western Maharashtra and Marathwada region of the state, tried to merge with the Marathas, often through marriage links. They could do so both due to the landowning pattern in these regions and a historically developed close interaction among these groups…The proper Marathas always opposed Kunbi moves of upward mobility and developed a strict internal hierarchy within themselves,” the paper said.
The paper goes on to add that while historically, Marathas have been very proud of their Kshatriya status, recent writings by leaders of the Maratha caste organisations claim a shudra status for them, arguing that Marathas and Kunbis are one and that both basically depend on subsistence agriculture.
Now, with the Marathas seeking Kunbi status, members of the latter community have reportedly expressed resentment, citing “past discrimination”.
Maratha community leaders believe that Marathas developed a pride in the Maratha identity during warrior king Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj’s reign. More recently, the Maratha pride especially swelled post the social reform movement led by Mahatma Jyotiba Phule in the late 1800s and later continued by Rajarshi Shahu, the first Maharaja of the Indian princely state of Kolhapur.
Phule had established the Satyashodhak Samaj, a social reformist society, in 1873 to fight caste discrimination and untouchability.
Drawing inspiration from the work of Phule and Shahu, the Akhil Bharatiya Maratha Shikshan Parishad was established in 1907. “It was an anti-Brahmin movement. The Marathas were colloquially being called Kunbat (alluding to their Kunbi roots). The Akhil Bharatiya Maratha Shikshan Parishad in one of the early sessions, passed a resolution that they shall henceforth identify themselves as Marathas,” Gaikwad said.
“So, the Maratha caste as we know it today came about because of regional pride and the result of the satyashodhak movement of Phule and Shahu Maharaj,” he added.
Historian Sawant cites the Satara census as an example for the above argument. He talks about how the British had conducted a census in Satara during the late 19th century which recorded Marathas and Kunbis in different categories.
“Marathas were 5,000. Kunbis were 2.5 lakh. Most people used to consider themselves as Kunbis,” he said.
“In 1931 when the census happened, suddenly the number of Kunbis plummeted and the number of Marathas increased. There is no logical sense to this transition. The reasons come more out of sentiment and pride,” he added.
(Edited by Smriti Sinha)
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