Mukta Salve [1841-1855]_🌿

In times, when the society in Pune was at the highest peak of caste orthodoxy and super rigid about untouchability in its inhuman form, a 14 years old girl child, Mukta Salve wrote an essay titled 'Mang Maharachya Dukhvisayi' or About the Grief of the Mang and the Mahars". The title Salve can be found in most of the families of Mang sub-caste in the former “Ati-Shudra” and today's Dalits and Nav-Buddhists in Maharashtra. The essay was published in a fortnightly journal namely 'Dnyanodaya'; in two parts. The first part was released on 15th February 1855 and the second was on 1st March 1855. [Narake, 1998]

Mukta Salve was a student of one of the three girls' schools that were started by Savitribai and Jotirao Phule. The essay was penned in the form of a memoir, an autobiographical piece in which Mukta Salve nailed out the monopoly of Brahmins in Hindu religion and Vedas in particular, whose imposition has led to the plight of Mang and Mahar Castes (the Ati-shudra and untouchable castes).

Mukta's essay precisely articulates the monopoly of Brahmin over Vedas. The non-Brahmin castes are not allowed to see the Vedas. The sub-castes within “Ati-shudra” such as people belonging to the Mang and Mahar castes were not even allowed to see Vedas. Being a person from an untouchable caste, she didn't have those rights; if not, she smartly questioned her people considering Vedas to be their religion, where they could neither know nor have the right to know what they follow and believe. Authoritative castes like Brahmin only have the right to study Vedas. She brings clarity to the matter of social locations of “Ati-Shudra” within the Chaturvarna and asserts that if the Mang and Mahar don't have the right to even see the sacred text, she says not to follow such religion.

In the essay very critically, Mukta Salve looks at the castes system where the untouchables don't have a religious identity like others. She protests to God for vanishing the existence of such a religion from the earth where only one person is privileged, and the rest are deprived.

📑 Mukta Salve [1841-1855]
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