In the decades succeeding 1857, the British had brought in their own theories of Aryan race as well as the idea of martial races. This concept was absent in the Indian context. Shivaji, who founded the Hindu self-rule, Hindavi Swarajya, had employed the Mahars in his army. Even during the much-disliked Peshwa rule, we find that the Mahars were employed in the army in the protection of forts (R D Palsokar, T Rabi Reddy; 1995) – at least during the reign of Baji Rao-I, though we do see that their social rank had started to slide down – clearly due to local socio-political factors. Yet British colonialists as well as Anglophile social reformers seized upon the racial narrative and claimed that the Mahars were the original inhabitants, before the ‘Aryan’ invaders, and projected the Peshwa as a continuity of Aryan oppressors while the British were hailed as the liberators.

Yet the bitter truth was that Hindavi Swaraj had no classification as martial and non-martial races and for generations had recognised the Mahars as soldiers. The British, on the other hand, used them and later threw them out as ‘non-martial races’.

Historian David Omissi in his The Sepoy and the Raj (Macmillan, 1994) writes that they regained some of the lost economic ground by serving in the Indian Army, which in turn was because “some of their traditional occupations had been threatened under British rule”.

When the British declared them as a non-martial race and excluded them from military recruitment, one of the earliest Mahar leaders at the end of the nineteenth century, Baba Walangkar, who himself had worked in the army, petitioned the government against the exclusion of Mahars in 1894. Here he claimed Kshatriya origin for Mahars and this in turn was based on the widespread presence of Mahars in Shivaji’s army.

However, what exposes the colonial and ongoing anti-Hindu myth of an enlightened British army offering space to the oppressed Mahars is a petition submitted by the Conference of Deccan Mahars to the Earl of Crewe (the Secretary of State for India). Asking for full rights as citizens of the Empire, just like the “Brahminical castes and Muhammedans”, the petition said: