Mahar Erotic

The Mahar are a Marathi-speaking community of the Deccan whose identity was forged twice: first by a hereditary place at the bottom of the village order in Maharashtra, then by a collective decision to walk out of it. They are the largest Scheduled Caste community in the state, with smaller populations in Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Telangana and Chhattisgarh. Under the old village system a Mahar household lived in the maharwada at the edge of the settlement and held a hereditary share of village duties: carrying messages, keeping watch, escorting officials, hauling away dead cattle, and remembering field boundaries, which made Mahars the people summoned when neighbors fought over a line in the dirt. Payment came as a share of the harvest. The arrangement guaranteed a place and barred them from temples, common wells and schools. The 14th-century poet-saint Chokhamela, a Mahar devotee of Vithoba, was kept outside the Pandharpur temple; his samadhi sits at its gate. Another way up ran through the army. Mahars served in the East India Company's Bombay Army, and at Koregaon on 1 January 1818 a small Company force heavy with Mahar soldiers held off the Peshwa's army. The victory pillar there draws huge crowds every New Year's Day, and the Indian Army's Mahar Regiment, raised in 1941, carries the line forward.

The pivot of modern Mahar history is B. R. Ambedkar, born into the community in 1891, the son of an army subedar. He led the 1927 Mahad satyagraha to drink from a public water tank, chaired the committee that drafted India's constitution, which outlawed untouchability, and on 14 October 1956 in Nagpur took Buddhist vows before a vast crowd, mostly Mahars, who converted with him and swore 22 pledges renouncing the Hindu gods and Brahmin-performed rites. Most Mahars today identify as Buddhist in that Ambedkarite tradition; a minority remain Hindu and some are Christian. It shows in ordinary life: a neighborhood vihara, the Buddha and Ambedkar framed side by side on the wall, blue flags, and Jai Bhim as a greeting. Crowds, many in white, fill Deekshabhoomi in Nagpur on the conversion anniversary and Chaitya Bhoomi in Mumbai every 6 December, the day Ambedkar died. Migration to Mumbai, Pune and Nagpur, along with reserved places in colleges and government jobs, has remade many families within a few generations. Mahar writers also built much of modern Marathi Dalit literature; Daya Pawar titled his landmark memoir Baluta, after the harvest share his ancestors were paid.