(The following is an excerpt from Manoj Mitta's new book Caste Pride: Battles for Equality in Hindu India (Context, 2023). Mitta's book is a legal history of caste discrimination and caste reforms in the colonial and postcolonial India.)
His more famous younger brother, Vallabhbhai Patel, India's first deputy prime minister, has been posthumously appropriated by Hindu nationalists. Vithalbhai Patel was, however, in the crosshairs of their precursors, including some leaders from the Indian National Congress. They were outraged by the audacity he had displayed in the second decade of the twentieth century in introducing a bill that challenged a non-negotiable part of the Hindu personal law.
Tabled in the Imperial Legislative Council on 5 September 1918, the bill boldly went where no one had gone before, the final frontier of social reform for Hindus. A barrister, Vithalbhai Patel proposed that the age-old ban on inter-caste marriage be lifted, transgressing the custom of endogamy within the Hindu framework itself.
The bill came on the heels of Maneckji Dadabhoy's abortive resolution of 1916. Potentially more disruptive of the social order of Hindus, Patel's bill was based on the premise that the long-term objective of abolishing untouchability could not be realised unless the ban on inter-caste marriage was removed.
Dadabhoy's resolution was relatively modest as it had only tried to make Hindus more compassionate to untouchables. While the 1916 resolution had aimed at making public life more inclusive, the 1918 bill strove to reconfigure the intimate aspect of family life, placing the individual autonomy of Hindus over caste constraint.
The timing of the bill, too, was remarkable. Patel introduced the bill just a day after he had been sworn in as a member of the Central legislature. He could hit the ground running, so to speak, thanks to the fortuitous time lag of almost six months between his election on 19 March 1918 and his induction in the subsequent session of the Council.
Patel's egalitarian credentials were already established in the Bombay legislature, well before his election to the Imperial Legislative Council.
He had piloted a seminal, norm-setting legislation that made primary education free and compulsory, at least in theory, in the urban areas of the Bombay Presidency.
Patel pulled this off about five years after Gopal Krishna Gokhale had failed to muster support from the colonial regime for his own pioneering bill of the same nature in the Central legislature.
An Improvement Over Civil Marriage Act
During his long waiting period as an elected member, Patel gave a notice for the introduction of his bill 'to validate marriages between Hindus of different castes'. The key expression was 'between Hindus'. For it was already possible for members of different castes to inter-marry under the Civil Marriage Act of 1872, subject to two conditions. The first was that such a marriage would have to be solemnised in a secular or non-religious way through the process of registration before a State authority. The second condition was that both parties would have to disclaim Hinduism and thereby suffer its worldly repercussions, whether social (in terms of fraternising) or economic (in terms of inheriting family property). In other words, apostasy was a precondition to inter-caste marriage.
Designed to appease the Hindu orthodoxy, this was the compromise on which the civil marriage law had been enacted at the instance of a radical section of the reformist Brahmo Samaj led by Keshab Chandra Sen. Thus, only those minuscule number of Hindus who had no inhibition in disavowing their religion could avail themselves of the option of civil marriage.
In a logical next step, there was an attempt in 1911 to amend the 1872 law so that Hindus would not have to give up their religion to marry across castes in the secular manner. But when Congress leader Bhupendra Nath Basu had introduced this amendment bill, Hindu conservatives opposed it firmly enough to thwart the reform.
This prompted the Arya Samaj, a larger reformist sect that also had a revivalist agenda, to come up with an even more ambitious proposal. Taking the bull by its horns, the Arya Samaj proposed that inter-caste marriage be legal even when performed with Hindu rituals. Indeed, whether out of love or otherwise, such marriages continued to take place among Hindus in defiance of this unnatural caste restriction and its legal and social repercussions.
In March 1916, the Aryan Brotherhood Conference of Bombay requested the Government of India to take up its draft as a government measure. The colonial administration intimated its willingness to consider the proposal of allowing inter-caste marriage, provided the bill was introduced by a non-official member. This was how Patel, around the age of forty-five, came to be associated with it.
Seeking to Reform the Codified Hindu Marriage Law
Vithalbhai Patel, long an implacable foe of caste, espoused the cause with conviction. He had, tor instance, stopped visiting his ancestral home at Karamsad and renounced all claim over it because his elder brother, Narsinbhai Patel, had insisted on following the tradition of holding a 'caste dinner' on their father's death. The eldest sibling had even rejected the offer made by Vithalbhai – and also by Vallabhbhai – to pay for any charitable activity in place of the caste dinner.
Mahatma Gandhi testified to the ease with which Vithalbhai Patel mingled with untouchables. In an obituary published in the Harijan on 3 November 1933, Gandhi recalled a 1916 episode. He had, on the spur of the moment, shifted a conference dedicated to Harijans to a ghetto of that community in Godhra. Though his visit was unscheduled, a surprise awaited Gandhi. 'Whom should I see there if not Vithalbhai Patel, who was then a member of the |Bombay] Legislative Council dressed in the peasant garb with a Sadhu's topee on his head? He mixed with the Harijans with the greatest freedom, and I know that he evinced the greatest interest in the Harijan cause. With him the Sweeper was as good as any other, no matter what his caste might be. He never concealed his opinion or practice in order to please the orthodox.
In lauding his courage, Gandhi might well have had Patel's inter-caste marriage bill in mind.
The the operative portion of which was blunt and unambiguous: 'No marriage among Hindus shall be invalid by reason that the parties thereto do not belong to the the same caste, any custom of any interpretation of Hindu law to the contrary notwithstanding.'
For this short but radical bill, Patel received the sanction of Governor General Lord Chelmsford on 10 August 1918. This paved the way for the introduction of what was titled the Hindu Marriages Validity Bill. After the historic widow-remarriage legislation of 1856, enacted on the eve of the great revolt, this was the first attempt in British India to reform the otherwise uncodified Hindu marriage law.
The bill was also the first caste-related legislative proposal to be introduced since the 1850 law protecting the inheritance rights of a Hindu who had been deprived of his caste. Both the 1850 and 1856 reforms were the work of British legislators. Indians began gaining entry into law-making bodies in an incremental manner only since 1861.
(The above is an edited excerpt. Paragraph breaks, blurbs and subheadings have been added for readers’ convenience.)
(Manoj Mitta is a Delhi-based journalist focusing on law, human rights and social justice. Mitta has written two critically acclaimed books on impunity for mass violence: When a Tree Shook Delhi: The 1984 Carnage and Its Aftermath, co-authored with HS Phoolka (2007) and The Fiction of Fact-finding: Modi and Godhra (2014).)
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