Abstract This essay locates the Vedokta controversy of 1899—a public debate about the purity of the king's body and the Kshatriya status of the Marathas—as a transformative and disruptive moment in the Marathi public world of the early twentieth century. The anti-Brahminism that emerged in the aftermath of the Vedokta controversy denied the authority of the Brahmins as the sole custodians of Hindu traditions and established a parallel Kshatriya priestly order. Concurrently, a new discursive imagination of non-Brahmins as Hindus, distinct from and exploited by the Brahmins, was also proposed. This claim enabled the politics of non-Brahminism to nurture a historical and cultural Hindu identity. Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century, this tension between negation of the Brahmin hegemony and an affirmative engagement with Hindu theological and spiritual traditions shaped the form and content of non-Brahminism. This essay charts the diverse trajectories of early twentieth-century non-Brahmin political discourse to demonstrate that the Vedokta moment gave rise to new debates about what it meant to be a Hindu and what Hinduism's ritual basis should be in modern times. In the process, it paved the way for a complex intertwining of non-Brahminism with diverse projects of Hinduness.
Rahul Sarwate (Thu,) studied this question.