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The rejection of the past on ideological grounds appears in a particularly strong form in modern Marathi poetry with the Dalit poets of the 1960s and 1970s. The Dalits appeared as a newly created social, religious, and political community about ten years after Indian Independence (1947), first in Maharashtra and subsequently in other parts of the country, from Karnataka to Punjab. The creation of the community was part of a movement that began at the end of the nineteenth century and was led after the 1920s by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, a singular figure in modern Indian history. It started specifically as a political movement among the Mahars, a jati or caste of untouchables in the Maharashtrian countryside. (The English word "untouchable" is a literal translation of asparshya in Sanskrit, Hindi, and Marathi, and also of achhoot in Hindi.) For about two thousand years the Mahars have hereditarily served as all-purpose servants, watchmen, messengers, and removers of dead cattle in villages and towns. As the historian Eleanor Zelliot has noted, they have also been singers, dancers, comedians, and drummers in the traveling folk repertory theater called the tamasha, one of the principal forms of public entertainment in Maharashtrian life and now one of the stimulating influences on modem Marathi drama.
As the lowest of the low, called the antyaj or the atishudra in the caste hierarchy, the Mahars cannot enter or worship in Hindu temples, can engage only in minimal and asymmetric transactions with the higher castes whom they serve collectively, and must live in a vada or quarter segregated from the village or town itself. They maintain the maharshishola, the stigmatized ground where they dispose of dead animals for the community. In exchange for their services they receive a predetermined proportion of the annual harvest of grain (called the maharpunj), expenses for pilgrimages to the shrine of the mother goddess they worship (the payment is termed maharbhadavi), and sometimes also an allocation of fertile land, on which they pay a special tax (designated maharki).
As far as the restrictions placed on them are concerned, the Mahars broadly resemble the other asparshya or atishudra castes in Maharashtra, such as the Mangs and the Chambhars. The Mangs are scavengers, whose jati includes a subcaste of folk...