The day five hundred Mahar soldiers changed Indian history
On the freezing morning of 1 January 1818, a small contingent of the British East India Company's Bombay Native Infantry — most of them Mahar Dalits — held a 28,000-strong Peshwa army to a standstill on the banks of the Bhima river. Two hundred and seven years later, the obelisk that marks their stand is the single most important pilgrimage site in Ambedkarite Buddhism.
By Special correspondent · Perne Phata, Maharashtra
Picture the scene. Five hundred soldiers — most of them from the Mahar community, branded "untouchable" by the very society they were defending — stand on the banks of the Bhima river under Captain Francis Staunton. They have marched through the night. Across the field, twenty-eight thousand soldiers of the Peshwa Baji Rao II — the regime that had upheld the most brutal caste laws in living memory — wait to crush them.
From sunrise to sundown the Mahar soldiers held their ground. Without rest, without reinforcement, without water for hours at a stretch, they fought a force fifty times their number. By the time night fell the Peshwa army withdrew, beaten. Two hundred and seventy-five of the five hundred Mahars were dead or wounded. The Peshwa's Brahminical regime would not survive the month.
The Vijay Stambh — the Victory Pillar — was raised by the East India Company shortly afterwards. It carries the names of forty-nine Mahar dead. For more than a hundred years afterwards it stood largely forgotten by the wider world, tended only by a small handful of villagers.
Then, on 1 January 1927, a young Babasaheb Ambedkar — already a barrister, already the conscience of the depressed classes — visited the obelisk. He read the names. He bowed his head. And he turned the site, and the date, into something larger: a national symbol of Dalit valour, a quiet annual rebuke to those who said our people were not warriors, not equal, not capable. From that visit the modern observance of Shourya Diwas was born.