COMMENTARY

Economic & Political Weekly EPW jUNE 21, 2014 vol xlix no 25
25
Homage to a Critic
of Marxist-Positivist History
K V Cybil
Sharad Patil structured a
discourse which surpasses and
overcomes the draining ennui of
a linear brahminical history
of India.
S
harad Patil, eminent thinker and
theorist of Indian society who
passed away on 12 April 2014, was
an extraordinary critic of Indian Marxism
and positivistic history. My introduction
to his works came in the wake of my
attempts to map the leading intellectual
gures of the anti-caste movement in
India, especially those from Maharashtra.
He was a most adamant and unpredict-
able critic of brahminism as the reign-
ing motif in composing the ancient past
of India. His persistent observation of
local, especially dalit and lower caste
practices and beliefs, and the slow,
gradual unravelling of a past that blended
with it is a quite original representation
of ancient India, difcult to be found
elsewhere.
His works were familiar to scholars
like Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib. The
former even helped him bring out his
rst major critique of Indian society,
Dasa-Sudra Slavery (New Delhi: Allied
Publishers, 1982), after Social Scientist
had terminated its contract to carry the
book in serialised articles. It had also
resulted in his locking horns with the
Communist Party of India (Marxist)
(CPI-M) of which he was a member. He
subsequently resigned in 1978. He then
founded the Satyashodhak Marxist Party
and also began the journal Satyashodhak
Marxwadi. The book itself was a review
of Ambedkars Who Were the Shudras,
which went into several volumes sub-
sequently. His insights into early India
and its lineages right into the present
have proved a veritable bounty for stu-
dents of Indian society. In Maharashtra,
he has a cult following now, which
surpasses in its popularity those of the
doyens of Indian Marxism, like S A Dange
and D D Kosambi.
The painstaking research that Sharad
Patil undertook, without much of a
formal education, places him within a
niche of his own. For a non-Marathi
speaker to relate to his ideas may at the
outset seem a little difcult. Many of his
arguments are so entrenched in the
discourse of Phule and Amedkarite
eschatology that its proper vision may
be represented only with several distor-
tions to non-Marathi speakers. Yet the
fact that he was a painter and also
experienced in activism at the grass
roots has given his thoughts a certain
air of enchantment to many other intel-
lectual circles. He has also confessed
how he derived his formulations about
the early Indian gynocracies women-
ruled Ganas after witnessing different
forms of matrilineal kinship in Kerala.
Such strong representations of non-
brahminical systems of power which
may have existed prior to the subjection
of womanhood and also the creation of
the shudra caste are difcult to be found
even amongst the Malayalis.
On Slavery
He for one was critical of the views of
Dange that slavery or the way it was
practised in Greece was unknown in
India. Dange had in other words denied
the possibility of addressing caste as an
institution which sanctioned slavery.
Slavery for that matter was considered
an anathema by Marxist scholars who
diluted it with theories of Aryan con-
quest and submission of native people.
The rootedness of slavery in pre-Aryan,
matrilineal society and the radical
claim of the brahmin as initially subject
to it was one of his original ideas. Of
course, there is little evidence to sup-
port this claim, but for the rudimental
insights one can glean from the vedas.
Such a task, which most Marxist scholars
had accepted as unnecessary in their
enthusiasm to graft historical materialism
onto Indian reality, was gracefully ful-
lled by Sharad Patil.
There is still one mystery surround-
ing his formulations, an answer to
which is difcult, but not uncalled for.
There are volumes of history remaining
to be told in the artistic vision of a
painter within which he interprets it.
That the women inherited property and
the right to rule in the ancient world,
and the brahmin was a sacricial vic-
tim who was killed after mating with
K V Cybil (cybilkv@yahoo.co.uk) teaches at
Christ College, Irinjalakuda, Kerala.
COMMENTARY
jUNE 21, 2014 vol xlix no 25 EPW Economic & Political Weekly
26
the clan mother (called Rashtri and
Nivrutti in pre-Vedic times), were in-
deed challenging arguments. It does not
end there because for him there was a
reason behind these sacrices in the ancient
world, the search for rain amidst droughts.
Thus the brahmin emerged as someone
who knew the mysteries of rain. Rain
was crucial to agriculture, the actual
secret of which reproduction was in
the possession of women. The story of
Rishyasringan, a young brahmin ascetic,
invited to mate with the princess of
Anga in order to produce rain and end
drought is archetypal in this context.
Knowledge of rains or the fact that rains
always move from south to north in
India leads to several interesting questions
about the theory of brahmin migration
from north to south. If brahmins were
considered the harbingers of rain in pre-
Aryan society, then they must have cer-
tainly originated in the south. But the
colonial historiography to which our
scholarship is still committed fails to
read this, the main reason being the
equation drawn between the Aryan and
the brahmin.
Breakthrough for Sociology
To think of a history of India without a
backing hypothesis of conquests from the
outside as the major turning point is a
feat very few could attempt. Sharad Patil
was one who followed the gradual evo-
lution of society in India. The substantial
difference from the rest was that he
granted it a sense of autonomy. The disci-
pline of sociology in India is most indebted
to him for that. This has been his uncanny
gift and the foundations he laid for stud-
ies of dalit and womens movements in
India are not easily comparable. To crown
it all, he also came up with a remarkable
hypothesis that the brahminical sense of
power arises from a kind of homosexual
marriage, which was concluded after
the decline of the gynocracies, between
the brahmin and the kshatriya. The only
difference was that this marriage precluded
sex or mating (an indispensable element
in the union of the earth mother and the
sacricial man in gynocracies) and insti-
tuted power in its place. Ritual preserves
a reality that is no more, he wrote.
The homosexual marriage of the female
king and the male priest is but the patriar-
chal modication of the matriarchal sacred
marriage of the rashtri with a Brahman.
These are some of the radical conclu-
sions he came to after a life-long career
spent in studying Indian society. The
kind of insights he makes with respect to
themes like marriage, state and sacrice
will continue to inspire new thoughts
and researches for a long time to come.
Despite everything, there is a tendency
for him to be swallowed up by the gaze
of a positivistic social science. What he
has contributed by means of structuring
a discourse which surpasses and over-
comes the draining ennui of a linear
brahminical history of India has to be
certainly appreciated. I think it will be a
major legacy that he is leaving behind.
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