Behind Tagore’s Response to the Poona Pact: Memory, Allegiance, and Anxiety

Abstract In a well-known sequence of events in the year 1932, following the Civil Disobedience Movement, Mohandas Gandhi, serving a jail term in Yeravda Prison in Poona, embarked on a fast unto death against the English Government’s decision of the Communal Award of 16 August 1932, to henceforth categorise the Depressed Classes of India as Scheduled Castes and statutory minorities, and, simultaneously, for purposes of adequate legislative representation, to provide them with separate electorates with immediate effect. Among the major consequences of the Communal Award, also known as the MacDonald Award, as these provisions were called in administrative idiom, was the vivisection of the Hindu community and, therewith, the alteration of the communal demography of the country. The rippling effects of the Communal Award included a bitter dispute in Bengal following the substantial reduction in the proportion of representation of the upper caste Hindu community and impinged on issues such as the respective population percentage of the Hindus and the Muslims in certain districts which were contested as being home to Hindu or Muslim majorities. From the standpoint of the Depressed Classes, mostly treated by Hindus as ‘Untouchables’, it was a significant first step towards their legislative recognition as an interest group, from a hitherto subordinate position within the larger Hindu community.