Three Western Women Scholars Who Pioneered the Study of India’s Anti-Caste Movements
(https://m.thewire.in/article/books/three-western-women-scholars-who-pioneered-the-study-of-indias-anti-caste-movements/amp?utm=relatedarticles)
Abhishek Bhosale
The week between April 11 and 14 brings together two dates that frame the genealogy of India’s anti‑caste tradition: Mahatma Jotirao Phule’s birth anniversary and Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Jayanti. Together, Phule and Ambedkar produced one of the most sustained and radical critiques of caste society anywhere in the world. Yet, for a long time, the academic study of the movements they inspired remained marginal within Indian historiography.
It was only in the decade after Ambedkar’s Mahaparinirvan that anti‑caste movements began to receive serious scholarly attention. Interestingly, three of the earliest and most rigorous studies were produced not in Indian universities but by Western women scholars: Eleanor Zelliot, Gail Omvedt, and Rosalind (Polly) O’Hanlon. Working independently but often drawing upon overlapping regions, histories, and archives in western India, these scholars pioneered the academic study of non-Brahmin and anti-caste revolt from below.
Through their doctoral research, each completed between the late 1960s and early 1980s, they brought the Mahar movement, the Non‑Brahmin movement, and the thought of Phule, along with other satyashodhaks and Ambedkar, into the centre of historical analysis. Their work treated anti‑caste mobilisation not as a footnote to nationalism or class struggle, but as an autonomous political and intellectual tradition with its own narratives & stories, leaders, ideas, institutions, and mass base. This article revisits their foundational doctoral studies and theses to understand how they reshaped the study of caste, anti-caste thinking and social movements in India.
In this image posted on April 11, 2026, President Droupadi Murmu pays floral tribute to the statue of Mahatma Jyotiba Phule during the latter's 200th birth anniversary celebration, at Prerna Sthal, Samvidhan Sadan, in New Delhi. Photo: X/@rashtrapatibhvn via PTI.
The first full‑length doctoral study on Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar was completed in 1969 by Eleanor Zelliot at the University of Pennsylvania. Titled Dr Ambedkar and the Mahar Movement, it was submitted just thirteen years after Ambedkar’s demise. The proximity of her research to the historical moment itself gave Zelliot an advantage no later scholar could replicate.
Born in 1926 in the United States, Eleanor Zelliot first came to India in 1952. Over the next four decades, she returned repeatedly, spending long periods in Pune and travelling extensively across Maharashtra. She undertook her doctoral fieldwork between 1963 and 1965, at a time when Ambedkar’s colleagues, family members, and frontline activists were still alive and actively involved in the Ambedkarite movement.
Zelliot initially planned to write a political biography of Ambedkar. However, her fieldwork transformed her approach. She realised that Ambedkar could not be understood apart from the caste community, the Mahar, that produced him. Her focus shifted to identifying the historical conditions within the Mahar community that made Ambedkar possible, and examining how Ambedkar, in turn, reshaped the destiny of that caste and people along with other untouchables. In her words, she chose to concentrate on the movement rather than the man.
A central question in Zelliot’s work is why the Mahar caste proved unique among India’s untouchable communities. Between the late nineteenth century and 1956, Mahar’s underwent a sustained process of political awakening. They formed organisations, launched newspapers, submitted petitions, contested elections, and produced leaders of national stature. Zelliot traces this trajectory back to structural changes under colonial rule, particularly army recruitment, urban employment, education, and the weakening of traditional village servant roles. These processes created a non‑traditional Mahar freed from customary subservience.
Zelliot restores early figures such as Gopal Baba Walangkar to their rightful place in history. She shows how Walangkar’s career as a retired Mahar army officer enabled him to critique caste injustice through petitions and writings from the 1890s onward. Ambedkar consistently acknowledged Walangkar’s contribution to the early Mahar movement. At the same time, a clear difference separated the two: while Walangkar powerfully documented the disadvantages faced by untouchables, but he did not propose concrete remedies to overcome them. Zelliot credits him with initiating a long tradition of political assertion among Mahar’s.
Ambedkar’s emergence, in Zelliot’s reading, was not accidental. It was the culmination of decades of caste mobilisation. She shows how Ambedkar seamlessly occupied a dual role, simultaneously reforming his own caste and representing untouchables before the colonial state. His brilliance, Western education and commitment to constitutionalism enabled him to articulate Mahar aspirations in a language legible to power.
Zelliot’s methodology was as pioneering as her argument. She used Marathi sources extensively, conducted oral history interviews across Maharashtra, and gained access to Ambedkar’s papers through Dr Savita Ambedkar. She interviewed stalwarts like Yashwant Ambedkar, Dadasaheb Gaikwad, Shantabai Kamble, Changdeo Khairmode, Vasant Moon, and many others. Her work is grounded not only in documents but in the living memory of people.
She made it clear that her thesis was not intended as a complete political biography of Ambedkar nor as a history of all untouchable castes. Its limits were explicit. Yet, by situating Ambedkar within the Mahar movement, she offered a methodological break from heroic biography and set a standard for Dalit history.
Before Zelliot’s thesis, biographies of Ambedkar did exist. Dhananjay Keer published Dr Ambedkar: Life and Mission in English in 1954 and later in Marathi. Changdeo Khairmode’s first volume of Ambedkar’s biography appeared in 1952. Keer even claimed that Ambedkar had read the manuscript of his English biography. These works were invaluable and written with personal engagement.
However, these early biographies focused on Ambedkar as an exceptional individual. Zelliot moved beyond them by embedding Ambedkar’s life within a longer history of caste and anti-caste mobilisation and the collective struggle of the Mahar movement. Her intervention laid the groundwork for later critical biographies and movement-centred studies of Ambedkar.
If Zelliot established the importance of studying anti‑caste movements as movements, Gail Omvedt expanded this vision by connecting caste revolt to culture, peasant politics, and class relations. While Zelliot remained primarily a historian, Omvedt consciously positioned herself as a Sociologist, scholar‑activist.
A young Gail Omvedt. Photo: Special arrangement
Gail Omvedt was born in 1941 in Minneapolis into a politically active American family, as documented in Somnath Waghmare’s documentary ‘Gail and Bharat’. Educated at the University of California, Berkeley, she was shaped by the radical politics of the 1960s, including the civil rights movement and New Left activism. She first came to India in the early 1960s and returned in 1970 to conduct doctoral research.
Her PhD dissertation, completed in 1973, was titled Cultural Revolt in a Colonial Society: The Non-Brahman Movement in Western India, 1873–1930. It fundamentally reinterpreted the Non-Brahmin movement not as elite rivalry but as a mass cultural revolt led by peasants, artisans, and lower-middle castes.
At the centre of Omvedt’s analysis was the Satyashodhak Samaj, founded by Jotirao Phule. She showed how it attacked Brahmanism as a system of cultural power upheld by ritual monopoly, priestly authority, and control over knowledge. The movement rejected Sanskritic rituals and propagated alternative social practices in villages and towns, using folk theatre, pamphlets, songs, and local meetings.
Omvedt argued that caste survived colonial transformations because its foundations were cultural rather than purely economic. Therefore, social revolution had to begin as cultural revolt. One of her most influential contributions was tracing the early articulation of bahujan samaj as a political identity linking caste hierarchy to economic exploitation.
Unlike many scholars, Omvedt rejected the idea that peasants were politically passive. She demonstrated that rural participation in the Non‑Brahmin movement represented a genuine form of mass politics. While acknowledging the movement’s limits and eventual decline, she insisted on its historical importance as a precursor to later Dalit and Bahujan movements.
After completing her PhD, Omvedt chose to live permanently in Maharashtra, settling in the village of Kasegaon in Satara District. She became an Indian citizen in 1983 and actively participated in anti‑caste, feminist, and farmers’ movements alongside her husband Bharat Patankar. Her scholarship never remained confined to the university.
Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low Caste Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India, Rosalind O'Hanlon, Cambridge University Press, 2002.
The first PhD devoted entirely to Mahatma Jotirao Phule was completed in 1983 by Rosalind O’Hanlon at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Titled Low‑Caste Protest and the Creation of a Political Identity, it was published by Cambridge University Press in 1985 with the title Caste, Conflict, and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low-Caste Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India.
Born in Britain, Rosalind O’Hanlon trained as a historian of South Asia and conducted meticulous archival research using Marathi sources. Her doctoral study was pioneering in positioning Phule not merely as a social reformer but as the first major theorist of low‑caste protest in western India.
O’Hanlon showed how Phule developed a coherent ideological critique of caste by reinterpreting Hindu history and mythology. His theory of Aryan conquest and Brahman domination transformed caste oppression from a religious condition into a historical injustice. This shift, she argued, was crucial in creating political consciousness among Shudra and ati‑Shudra communities.
Her work demonstrated that low‑caste protest involved deliberate identity formation. Phule addressed a broad collective rather than a single caste, using vernacular Marathi, popular culture, and peasant symbols to forge solidarity. O’Hanlon stressed that this ideological labour was central to the emergence of non‑Brahmin politics later.
Unlike nationalist histories that portrayed colonial India as steadily moving toward consensus, O’Hanlon revealed deep conflicts over authority, culture, and leadership. For her, Phule represented an alternative vision of modernity rooted in equality rather than religious unity.
One of the strongest unifying threads across the work of Zelliot, Omvedt, and O’Hanlon is their critique of Indian historiography itself.
Zelliot noted that while elite life, nationalist politics, and colonial administration were well documented, the history of dynamic untouchable caste movements remained invisible. She argued that without this missing history, Indian social history remained incomplete and distorted.
Omvedt was more explicit and confrontational. She argued that Indian historians privileged harmony over conflict, nationalism over social revolution, and elites over mass movements. Because the Non-Brahmin movement openly challenged Brahman-dominated nationalism, it was marginalised as divisive. Even Marxist historians, she pointed out, often treated caste as residual rather than structural.
O’Hanlon identified language, literacy, and caste bias as major factors. Much of low-caste political thought was expressed in Marathi, in idioms dismissed as rustic or unsophisticated by elite scholars. Yet, she insisted, any serious understanding of Indian history required engagement with these vernacular traditions of protest.
Importantly, all three learned Marathi, as the most significant sources were not available in English; consequently, their theses include notes on translation and nomenclature.
From Untouchable To Dalit: Essays on the Abedkar Movement, Eleanor Zelliot, Manohar Publishers and Distributors, 1996.
None of these scholars stopped with their doctoral work. Eleanor Zelliot wrote From Untouchable to Dalit, Untouchable Saints, Ambedkar’s World, The Experience of Hinduism, and numerous essays that shaped Dalit studies globally.
Gail Omvedt authored an extensive body of work, including Dalits and the Democratic Revolution, Buddhism in India, Understanding Caste, Ambedkar: Towards an Enlightened India, Reinventing Revolution, Seeking Begumpura, We Will Smash This Prison! Violence Against Women, and several others, bridging scholarship and activism.
Rosalind O’Hanlon’s later works include Lineages of Brahman Power, Religious Cultures in Early Modern India co-edited with David Washbrook, and edited work A Comparison Between Women and Men: Tarabai Shinde and the Critique of Gender Relations in Colonial India.
Eleanor Zelliot, Gail Omvedt, and Rosalind O’Hanlon did not simply write about anti-caste movements. They helped create a field of study that Indian academia could have ignored. Their work showed that the struggle against caste was not marginal, derivative, or secondary, but central to the making of modern India.
Their pioneering doctoral studies work remains reminders that history changes not only when new movements emerge, but when new questions are finally asked. Remembering these three scholars on this occasion of Ambedkar Jayanti is a reminder that the battle against caste was also a battle over how history would be written. Their work ensured that anti‑caste movements were not treated as side stories after Ambedkar, but as central to understanding modern India.
Abhishek Bhosale is a Doctoral Researcher at SOAS University of London (UK).
Sayali Sahasrabudhe is a Doctoral Researcher at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.
This article went live on April eleventh, two thousand twenty six, at forty-four minutes past one in the afternoon.
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