Conversion as Sacred Rupture and Continuity: Reimagining Ambedkar’s 1956 Buddhist Conversion in Dalit Religious Narratives

Abstract

This article examines how B. R. Ambedkar’s 1956 Buddhist conversion is re-narrativized in Mahar Dalit life writing as a foundational religious event that simultaneously embodies rupture and continuity. Drawing on three Marathi Dalit texts, Akkarmashi, Baluta and The Prisons We Broke, all examined in their published English translations, and situated within the theological framework of Ambedkar’s Buddha and His Dhamma, the study argues that Dalit authors transform the conversion event into a sacred narrative structure organized around suffering, awakening, and liberation. Rather than representing a simple rejection of religion, these narratives reconfigure the religious imagination by producing a form of counter-sacrality that both contests and reconstitutes the sacred: the suffering of the caste order is retrospectively sanctified as the necessary prehistory of collective rebirth, while the 1956 conversion is preserved as a permanently reactivatable origin point for ongoing religious and political life. The study proposes Dalit sacred time as a distinct analytical model of subaltern religious temporality, characterized by three features. By foregrounding a non-Western, intercultural case, the article engages directly with questions of continuity and contestation in the relationship between literature and religion, showing how literary texts can generate new forms of religious meaning beyond established traditions.

1. Introduction

On 14 October 1956, in the city of Nagpur, B. R. Ambedkar led an estimated half-million Mahar community in a collective conversion to Buddhism, which was the largest mass religious conversion in modern Indian history. The event was not merely political theater. It was the culmination of decades of theological reflection on the relationship between caste, suffering, and liberation, and it produced an entirely new religious identity for the Mahar community: the Navayana Buddhist, a practitioner of what Ambedkar himself described as a reconstructed Buddhism oriented not toward individual transcendence but toward collective social emancipation (Ambedkar 1957). Yet the 1956 conversion was not simply a rupture with the past; it was simultaneously an act of continuity, a claiming of the Buddhist tradition as the rightful inheritance of those whom Brahminic religion had most excluded. This dialectic of rupture and continuity is the defining structure of the Dalit1 religious imagination, and it is the subject of this article.

The scholarly literature on the 1956 event is substantial, spanning political history (Zelliot 1992; Omvedt 1994), philosophy of religion (Queen 1996; Tartakov 2003), and social theory (Guru 1997). Ambedkar himself was born into a Mahar family and experienced untouchability firsthand throughout his early life, yet went on to become one of independent India’s most significant legal and political architects, serving as the principal drafter of the Indian Constitution. His decades-long campaign for the rights of the depressed classes encompassed legal challenges to caste discrimination, the founding of political organizations, and sustained theological reflection on the relationship between religion and social hierarchy. His choice of Buddhism over Islam or Christianity was deliberate and argued, he rejected both on the grounds that they were foreign to Indian soil, while Buddhism, he contended, had been India’s own egalitarian tradition, suppressed by Brahminic Hinduism precisely because of its rejection of caste hierarchy. The 1956 conversion was the culmination of this lifelong project. What remains comparatively underdeveloped is the question of how the conversion has been narrativized, how it has been worked into the fabric of literary memory and made available as a continuing source of religious meaning. Dalit literary studies has expanded rapidly since the 1990s. Within English-language scholarship, the dominant focus has fallen on Hindi Dalit literature, particularly Omprakash Valmiki’s autobiography Joothan, which has attracted substantial monograph-length study (Hunt 2014; Brueck 2014; Mukherjee 2003). Arundhati Roy’s Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things (Roy 1997) further extended international awareness of caste to a global readership, though from outside the Dalit movement itself. This focus has displaced Marathi Dalit literature from the center of Anglophone scholarship, despite the fact that Marathi was the language in which Dalit autobiography first emerged as a genre and in which the Ambedkarite movement was most deeply rooted. The foundational English-language scholarship was established by Zelliot (1992, 2013), whose four-decade engagement documented the transformation of Dalit identity politics and Ambedkar’s cultural legacy. Subsequent work by Omvedt (1994, 2003), Rawat and Satyanarayana (2016), Rege (2006), and Jondhale and Beltz (2004) has deepened this foundation. Nevertheless, three gaps remain: Dalit autobiographical texts have been treated primarily as social documents rather than theological productions; the specifically Mahar community’s writing has received less sustained attention than it merits; and the theoretical conversation about subaltern religious temporality has not been systematically developed in relation to Dalit materials. This article addresses all three gaps.

The article approaches these questions through three canonical texts of Mahar Dalit life writing: Baluta (Pawar 2015), The Outcaste/Akkarmashi (Limbale 2003), and The Prisons We Broke/Jina Amucha (Kamble 2008). All three are examined in their published English translations. This reliance on translation is acknowledged as a methodological constraint. Key religious and caste-specific terms, baluta, dukkha, diksha, jati, Triratna, retain their Marathi originals throughout, and the study attends to their semantic weight rather than treating their English renderings as transparent equivalents.

The central argument is that the three texts cooperate in constructing what this article calls Dalit sacred time: a mode of subaltern religious temporality that is simultaneously a rupture with the Brahminic sacred order and a continuity with a reconstructed Buddhist tradition. This is not a wholesale rejection of the category of the sacred but a counter-sacral remaking of it, a reconfiguration of religious meaning from within the experience of those whom the dominant sacred order has most thoroughly excluded.

2. Literature Review

The academic study of Dalit literature has undergone a dramatic expansion since the 1990s. The publication of Arjun Dangle’s Poisoned Bread: Translations from Modern Marathi Dalit Literature in 1992 marked a watershed moment: as the first anthology of Dalit literature in English translation, it introduced the Marathi Dalit tradition, the oldest and most formally developed strand of Dalit literary production, to an Anglophone scholarly audience that had previously had little access to it (Dangle 1992). The significance of this editorial act can hardly be overstated. Marathi Dalit writing had by then been producing autobiographies, poetry, and short fiction for three decades, yet remained effectively invisible to scholars working outside the subcontinent. Poisoned Bread provided the first systematic account of the tradition’s range, foregrounding voices from the Mahar, Mang, and Chambhar communities and demonstrating the extent to which Dalit literature had developed its own aesthetic criteria, its own genealogy of influences, and its own criteria of literary judgment independent of the Brahminic mainstream.

Despite this opening, subsequent English-language scholarship gravitated overwhelmingly toward Hindi Dalit literature, particularly toward Omprakash Valmiki’s autobiography Joothan (Valmiki 2003). Laura Brueck’s Writing Resistance: The Rhetorical Imagination of Hindi Dalit Literature (Brueck 2014) and Sarah Beth Hunt’s Hindi Dalit Literature and the Politics of Representation (Hunt 2014) established the critical framework within which most Anglophone readers now encounter Dalit writing, a framework that, by its very success, has tended to render the specifically Mahar genealogy of the tradition legible only insofar as it resembles or anticipates the Hindi model. The consequence is a significant distortion of the tradition’s actual history: Marathi Dalit autobiography preceded Hindi Dalit autobiography by nearly a decade, produced the genre’s founding canonical texts, and is more directly connected to the theological and political project of Ambedkarite Navayana Buddhism than any subsequent Hindi development. The three texts examined in this article, Baluta, Akkarmashi, and The Prisons We Broke, are not peripheral to the Dalit literary tradition; they are its founding documents.

The theoretical framework proposed in this article stands in direct relationship to a substantial body of critical reflection on Mircea Eliade’s phenomenology of religion. Eliade’s account of sacred time as the periodic reactualization of the cosmogonic myth, the return to an eternal present through ritual regression, has exercised a formative influence on the study of religion for over half a century (Eliade 1959). Yet that influence has been accompanied from early on by systematic critique. Jonathan Z. Smith’s Map Is Not Territory (Smith 1993) provides the most rigorous and sustained challenge to Eliade’s foundational assumptions. Smith argues that Eliade’s privileging of a “locative” religious imagination, one oriented toward cosmic order, mythological return, and the sanctification of place, represents a parochial scholarly preference rather than a universal religious phenomenon. Against Eliade’s assumption that all religious experience aspires toward the recovery of a primordial sacred order, Smith demonstrates the equal historical prevalence of what he calls “utopian” religious orientations: modes of religious experience that are constituted precisely by their rejection of the given order, their refusal to sanctify what is, and their orientation toward a radically new world that does not yet exist (Smith 1993, pp. 100–3). This distinction between locative and utopian religious imaginaries maps directly onto the contrast between Brahminic sacred time (which consecrates the existing caste order as divinely ordained) and Dalit sacred time (which ruptures it). The present article’s argument can be understood as a concrete historical case study of Smith’s theoretical claim: Navayana Buddhism as a “utopian” religious imagination constructed in explicit opposition to the locative sanctifications of the caste system.

Smith’s critique of Eliade also bears on the question of scholarly method. Smith argues that the phenomenological method, as practiced by Eliade, tends to produce an idealized account of religion purified of historical contingency and social conflict, an account in which “the sacred” appears as a universal human experience rather than as a category produced through specific social practices in specific historical contexts (Smith 1993, pp. 88–103). This methodological critique directly motivates the present article’s insistence on reading the Dalit sacred time framework through close attention to specific texts produced in a specific historical conjuncture, rather than extrapolating from abstract typologies. The point is not to abandon the category of sacred time altogether, Eliade’s insight that religious communities organize their temporal experience around founding events of heightened intensity remains productive, but to historicize and socially situate the category in ways that Eliade’s own method consistently resisted.

The social situating of sacred time requires, in addition to Smith’s critique, the resources of the Durkheimian tradition in a different dimension: the study of collective memory. Maurice Halbwachs’s On Collective Memory (Halbwachs 1992), the first comprehensive English translation of his foundational work on the social construction of memory, provides the theoretical grounding for this article’s account of what it calls “permanent reactivatability.” For Halbwachs, memory is never simply individual: it is always embedded in and sustained by collective frameworks, group structures, shared practices, communal narratives, that give individual recollection its shape and content (Halbwachs 1992, pp. 37–40). More fundamentally, Halbwachs argues that communities sustain their identity and coherence through the ongoing practice of shared remembrance, which allows founding events to remain present and generative rather than receding into an inaccessible past. This is precisely what this article identifies as permanent reactivatability: the capacity of the 1956 conversion to function not as a completed historical event but as a living resource, perpetually available through the commemorative practice of autobiographical writing. Halbwachs’s account of religious collective memory is particularly relevant here: in his analysis of pilgrimage communities and their relationship to sacred sites, he demonstrates how communities construct and sustain a relationship to founding events that they did not personally witness, exactly the situation of Baby Kamble, who was not present at Nagpur but for whom the event is nonetheless constitutively present (Halbwachs 1992, pp. 193–235). Dalit autobiographical writing, on this reading, functions as the literary analogue of pilgrimage: a commemorative practice that makes the founding sacred moment present to those who did not witness it and re-present to those who did.

3. Theoretical Framework: Sacred Rupture, Counter-Sacrality, and Dalit Sacred Time

In Mircea Eliade’s phenomenology of religion, sacred time is the periodic reactualization of a mythical event, specifically the cosmogony, the act of creation, through which participants escape the “terror of history” and enter an eternal present (Eliade 1959, p. 104). The fundamental structure of sacred time, for Eliade, is regression: the believer returns, through ritual, to an absolute beginning. This framework presents an immediate structural impossibility when applied to the Dalit Buddhist case. The Mahar community cannot return to any golden cosmogonic origin, because the very origin myths of Hindu cosmology, the Manusmriti’s account of the creation of the varna order from the body of Brahma, are precisely what legitimate the Mahar’s millennial subjugation. As Ambedkar argued in Buddha and His Dhamma, Brahminic theology rests on “graded inequality” inscribed from the beginning of creation: “The soul of this theory, it is obvious, is inequality. This social inequality is not the result of historical growth. Inequality is the official doctrine of Brahminism” (Ambedkar 1957, Book Three, Part V). For Dalit sacred time, Eliadean regression is not restoration but reenslavement.

This impossibility of return is what makes the 1956 conversion structurally necessary as a rupture rather than a retrieval. The Dalit religious imagination cannot be organized around a cosmogonic beginning it wishes to reenter; it must be organized around a historical break it wishes to sustain. From Eliade, however, this article retains the insight that religious temporality is organized around a founding event that functions as a permanent availability, a moment that can be reactivated and reexperienced rather than merely recalled. What it rejects is Eliade’s assumption that this founding event must be cosmogonic and ahistorical. The founding event of Dalit sacred time is documented, social, and political: the Nagpur conversion of 14 October 1956.

The concept of counter-sacrality describes the process by which the three texts examined here simultaneously contest and reconstitute the sacred. This is not a secular rejection of religion but a religious rejection of a particular theology, specifically, the Brahminic theology that consecrates the caste order as divinely ordained. Ambedkar’s conversion was not a move away from the sacred but a move toward a different sacred: a Buddhism reconstructed to affirm the humanity and dignity of those whom Brahminism had defined as sub-human.

This counter-sacral move involves both rupture and continuity in a precise dialectical relationship. The rupture is enacted through the destruction of household gods, the repudiation of the Brahminic pantheon, the taking of vows that explicitly negate previous religious obligations. The continuity is enacted through the adoption of a Buddhist tradition that Ambedkar presented not as foreign but as the authentic religious inheritance of India’s oppressed, the tradition that Brahminism had suppressed precisely because of its egalitarian commitments (Ambedkar 1957). The three Dalit texts examined here narrate this double movement: they are texts of sacred rupture, in that they record the breaking of one religious world, and texts of sacred continuity, in that they trace the construction of another.

Post-Durkheimian ritual theory provides additional resources for understanding the counter-sacral function. Durkheim (1995) theorized collective effervescence as reinforcing the existing social order; but as Bell (1992) and Asad (1993) have argued, collective ritual can equally function as counter-hegemonic practice, a deliberate disruption of the sacred orders that legitimate existing hierarchies. The Nagpur conversion of 1956 was precisely such a counter-hegemonic effervescence: a mass ritual act that produced a new collective sacred identity precisely by staging the destruction of the old one.

Lewis Rambo’s seven-stage model of religious conversion (Rambo 1993) is employed here heuristically rather than structurally. Baluta operates primarily at the “context” stage, constructing the pre-conversion caste world whose frozen temporality makes the rupture of 1956 comprehensible. Akkarmashi enacts “crisis” and the approach of “encounter”. The Prisons We Broke narrates “commitment” and “consequences”. The three texts constitute a collective conversion narrative whose full shape, the dialectic of rupture and continuity, becomes legible only in aggregate.

Dalit sacred time is proposed as a distinct analytical model with three defining features, each of which encodes the dialectic of rupture and continuity that structures the entire framework.

Retrospective sanctification. Caste suffering does not possess inherent religious meaning at the moment of its occurrence. It acquires that meaning retrospectively, from the perspective of post-conversion narration. The suffering of the pre-conversion world is re-read, after 1956, as the necessary dark prehistory without which the luminosity of the conversion moment would be unintelligible. This is the continuity dimension of retrospective sanctification: the past is not simply rejected but redeemed, reintegrated into a narrative of providential necessity.

Permanent reactivatability. The 1956 conversion event does not belong to a completed past. Each act of narrative retelling is simultaneously a description of the past event and a reperformance of it. The narrating subject does not merely remember 1956; the act of narration participates in the ongoing reality of what 1956 initiated. This feature ensures that the rupture of 1956 is not a one-time event but a permanent resource—a sacred origin that can be re-entered through narrative practice.

Immanent orientation. Unlike Eliade’s sacred time, which transcends history and moves toward a mythical eternity, Dalit sacred time remains resolutely within history. Its telos is not nirvana in any traditional sense but the removal of dukkha understood as social suffering produced by the caste system. As Ambedkar argued, this is activist rather than pessimistic, “Karl Marx also said that there is exploitation in the world… And yet nobody has said that Karl Marx’s doctrine is pessimism” (Ambedkar 1957, Book Six, Part III). This feature is consonant with what scholars have identified as subaltern immanent sacrality (Pieris 1988): the sacred is located in the material suffering of the oppressed and in its historical transformation.

4. Before the Sacred Rupture: Caste’s Frozen Temporality in Baluta

Daya Pawar’s Baluta (Pawar 2015) takes its title from the baluta system, the hereditary obligation of Mahar families to perform compulsory, unpaid service for upper-caste households in exchange for designated shares of the village’s annual produce (Pinto 2015). By titling his autobiography Baluta, Pawar locates his narrative within a specific temporal structure: the structure of obligation without end, service without recompense, and a social position reproduced across generations without alteration. The reading of baluta as temporal arrest is the article’s interpretive argument, not a claim about the Marathi term’s literal meaning. The autobiography’s identity is inseparable from the temporal system that structured the community’s existence before the rupture of 1956; to name the book after the system is already to frame the book as the record of what was broken.

This temporal stasis is the dominant experiential register of the book’s opening chapters. Pawar’s grandmother Aaji “could not remember the names of any of her husband’s ancestors. I have seen the genealogies of many families in books. Some of these take the form of magnificent family trees and even find mention in history books. But even I do not know the names of anyone before my great-grandfather” (Pawar 2015, p. 10). The upper-caste family has a history, a named lineage reaching back into traceable time. The Mahar family has only an undifferentiated continuity of service and suffering: not a genealogy but a condition. The absence of genealogy reflects the Mahar’s exclusion from the systems of record-keeping that constitute historical identity. One cannot have sacred ancestors if one’s ancestors have been denied the status of historical agents.

The text’s most startling articulation of this temporal arrest comes in a scene of bone-division among Mahar families:

Illustrations of primitive men sitting at the mouth of their caves. A fire in the middle. The carcass of an animal on the spit. Teeth tearing into the meat. I could see a relationship somewhere, or so I would think.

(Pawar 2015, p. 48)

This simile is rhetorically powerful but not ideologically neutral. Pawar’s equation of Mahar life with prehistoric cave-dwelling draws on an evolutionary-developmental temporal framework whose colonial genealogy has been extensively critiqued in postcolonial studies (Chakrabarty 2000). What makes the passage analytically productive is what Pawar does with this borrowed idiom: by adopting the colonizer’s developmental framework to describe the effect of the caste system on Mahar temporality, he turns that idiom against its source. The caste system, not the Mahar people, is what has kept the community outside developmental time. This is a rhetorical act of accusation. It also establishes the phenomenology of the “before” that the counter-sacral rupture of 1956 must address: the intensity of liberation must be commensurate with the depth of imprisonment.

The pre-conversion world’s religiosity reinforces rather than relieves this temporal imprisonment. The Mahar community worships Khandoba, Mari-Aai, and local deities because it has been excluded from Brahminic sacred spaces. Pawar’s grandmother performs her religious service, dragging the chariot of the goddess Mari-Aai through the village during an epidemic, as a mandatory baluta duty, only to be publicly humiliated. The religious service is inseparable from the social humiliation, the Mahar’s relationship to the sacred reproduces rather than relieves her subjugation. This is the continuity that the 1956 rupture must break, not religion as such, but a specific theology that legitimates graded inequality. The temporal structure of Baluta is organized around an absence, the absence of the sacred rupture that the text’s early chapters have not yet reached. Pawar writes from a post-conversion standpoint but narrates the pre-conversion world, the suffering of the past is narrated from a position of knowledge that it was the necessary prehistory of a collective rebirth. This is retrospective sanctification in its foundational form.

5. At the Threshold: Liminality and the Approach of Counter-Sacrality in Akkarmashi

If Baluta provides the phenomenology of temporal stasis, Sharankumar Limbale’s Akkarmashi (Limbale 2003) provides the phenomenology of crisis, the condition of a self so thoroughly excluded from existing social orders that it occupies a state of permanent liminality. Turner’s (1969) account of liminality as the “betwixt and between” condition of the ritual process describes a threshold state in which old social identities have been dissolved but new ones have not yet been constituted. Limbale’s narrator occupies such a threshold, but with a crucial difference, where Turner’s liminal subject moves toward reintegration into a renewed social order, Limbale’s narrator finds that no reintegration is available within the existing order. His liminality is not a passage but a condition, the condition of one for whom the existing sacred order has no place, and who therefore stands on the threshold of the counter-sacral rupture that 1956 will inaugurate.

Limbale is the illegitimate son of a high-caste Patil landlord and a Mahar woman. His double exclusion is precise, in the Maharwada, he is called “akkarmashi” (half-caste, illegitimate) and denied full community belonging; in the upper-caste village, he is identified as Mahar and denied access. As he observes, “In the Maharwada I felt humiliated as I was considered a bastard; they called me akkarmashi. Yet in the village I was considered Mahar and teased as the offspring of one” (Limbale 2003, p. 62). He belongs to no sacred community whose temporal narrative includes his existence.

The narrator’s confrontation with the theological order of Hinduism enacts the “crisis” stage not as a crisis of personal faith but as a crisis of cosmological belonging:

We were supposed to say our prayers from the steps outside. Our entering a temple will make God impure… The untouchables must not enter a temple. God discriminates between man and man. He makes one man rich and the other poor. One is high caste, the other untouchable. What kind of God is this that makes human beings hate each other?… We don’t approve of this God, nor this religion, nor this country because they ostracize us.

(Limbale 2003, p. 62)

The narrator rejects the entire theological architecture that sanctions untouchability. This rejection is the necessary precondition for the counter-sacral rupture, one cannot reconstitute the sacred without first refusing the sacred order that has been used to justify one’s dehumanization. Ambedkar functions in this context as a figure of soteriological mediation, the agent whose intervention transforms the narrator’s condition of theological exclusion into the possibility of a new sacred belonging. The liminality of Akkarmashi is thus not merely sociological but theological: the narrator stands in the gap between the sacred order he has rejected and the counter-sacral order that Ambedkar’s conversion will open.

The liminality is further expressed through bodily self-alienation, “High-caste blood ran in my body. Could I drain this blood out of my body? My own body nauseated me” (Limbale 2003, p. 82). The pollution logic of the caste system has penetrated the narrator’s experience of his own body. The counter-sacral rupture of 1956 will address precisely this somatic dimension, the conversion oath that “became part of our blood” (Kamble 2008, p. 202) is the counter-inscription that replaces pollution with liberation at the level of bodily constitution. The continuity here is somatic: the body that was the site of caste pollution becomes, through conversion, the site of sacred liberation.

The text’s most remarkable staging of the approach of counter-sacrality comes in a nocturnal passage:

I am out of myself, like Siddhartha who left his palace at midnight… I hoped for some apostle or an angel. Or at least a terrible ghost. But there was nothing here except the howling of dogs.

(Limbale 2003, p. 108)

I wished for a dream at least in the early hours of dawn, like the one Mayadevi had at the time of Siddhartha’s birth.

(Limbale 2003, p. 108)

Limbale positions his condition of caste liminality in explicit parallel with Siddhartha’s midnight departure from the palace, the founding moment of the Buddhist soteriology that Ambedkar will reconstruct as Navayana Buddhism. This is the continuity dimension of the counter-sacral rupture, Limbale’s pre-conversion anguish is retrospectively sanctified by being aligned with the originary spiritual crisis that preceded the founding of Buddhism itself. Writing from a post-conversion standpoint, Limbale transforms his pre-conversion anguish into the darkness before a dawn that the reader, but not yet the narrated self, knows is coming. The liminal suffering acquires religious meaning through the narrative position from which it is recounted.

6. The Sacred Moment Itself: Rupture, Continuity, and the Reactivation of 1956 in The Prisons We Broke

Baby Kamble’s The Prisons We Broke (Kamble 2008) narrates the sacred moment itself, not as it occurred at Nagpur (Baby Kamble did not attend), but as it was received and lived within her Mahar community in Phaltan, Maharashtra. Her narrative position as an embedded community witness is itself significant for the argument about rupture and continuity, she demonstrates that the sacred moment does not require direct presence to be experienced with full religious force. The counter-sacral rupture of 1956 is available to those who were there and to those who were not; it can be received as well as witnessed; it can be reactivated through writing as well as through ritual. This is the literary enactment of permanent reactivatability.

Before reaching 1956, the text establishes the theological status of Ambedkar through a series of accumulating epithets:

He was our Baliraja who gave away his kingdom for Truth. He was like Rawan who squandered away his kingdom for character. He was our Buddha who taught love, brotherhood and equality unto all. He was our Bhim, our king and our saviour, who blessed the blind with sight.

(Kamble 2008, p. 91)

Ambedkar is identified simultaneously with Baliraja, with the Rawan, with the Buddha, and with Bhim. This liturgical passage enacts both dimensions of the counter-sacral rupture. The rupture is present in the displacement of the Hindu theological order: Ambedkar is not a figure within the Brahminic pantheon but a figure who displaces it. The comparison to Rawan deserves particular attention. In the Sanskrit epic tradition, Rawan is the dark-skinned antagonist of the Ramayana, the demon king whose defeat by Rama is celebrated in Brahminic ritual practice as the triumph of divine order over demonic transgression. Yet within Dalit and Dravidian political imagination, Rawan has been systematically reimagined as a figure of anti-Brahminic resistance, the sovereign destroyed precisely because he refused to accept the hierarchical order that Rama’s victory consecrates. Baby Kamble’s identification of Ambedkar with Rawan draws on this counter-hegemonic tradition. The comparison is not merely moral, Rawan “squandered away his kingdom for character”, but also somatic and political, to claim Rawan as an ancestral figure is to assert a genealogy that runs counter to the Brahminic narrative of cosmic order, and to locate the Mahar community within a tradition of defiant dark-skinned sovereignty rather than divinely ordained subjugation. The deep entanglement of colorism and casteism in the Indian subcontinent means that this identification carries a further dimension of somatic reclamation, the counter-sacral rupture operates not only at the level of religious doctrine but at the level of bodily and racial self-understanding. The continuity is present in the appropriation of Buddhist soteriological language: by identifying Ambedkar as “our Buddha”, Baby Kamble asserts a continuity with the Buddhist tradition that Brahminism had suppressed. He functions as a figure of soteriological mediation, the agent who creates the conditions under which a community passes from one form of religious existence to another (Ambedkar 1957; Tartakov 2003; Jondhale and Beltz 2004).

The most concentrated articulation of this sacred rupture comes in a passage that condenses the entire temporal structure of Dalit sacred time into a few sentences:

We were not human beings then. We were alive only because our eyes moved in their sockets. Otherwise, we were merely skeletons, without any life in us! But when Baba came, a new spark enlivened us. The flame of Bhim started burning in our hearts. We began to walk and talk. We became conscious that we too are human beings… The struggle yielded us three jewels—humanity, education and the religion of the Buddha.

(Kamble 2008, p. 107)

The “then” (non-existence, ‘merely skeletons’) and the “when Baba came” (resurrection, ‘a new spark enlivened us’) enact the rupture. The transformation is bodily and ontological, the community is reborn, not merely reformed. Yet the continuity is equally present in the reformulation of the Buddhist triratna (Three Jewels), in traditional Buddhism, the Three Jewels are the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha; Baby Kamble replaces them with “humanity, education and the religion of the Buddha”. A note on translation is warranted: this substitution appears in the Marathi original (Jina Amucha) rather than being an artifact of translation, and is therefore Baby Kamble’s own theological act. The substitution enacts continuity, the Buddhist doctrinal framework is retained, while performing rupture: the framework is reconstructed to serve the specific soteriological needs of the Mahar community (Ambedkar 1957).

The account of how the 1956 conversion reached the Mahar community of Phaltan is narrated not as doctrinal instruction but as material and affective transformation. Baby Kamble describes how Mahar families broke the images of the gods and goddesses that had hung on their walls, turned their backs on the old pilgrimages and festivals, and renounced their allegiance to the Hindu pantheon through the conversion vows Ambedkar had prescribed. The old gods, Mari-Aai, Mhasoba, Khandoba, are precisely the deities that Pawar’s Baluta had shown presiding over the baluta system, the gods whose worship was itself a form of caste service. To break their images is to repudiate the theological order that had legitimated Mahar subjugation. Yet the continuity is equally present, the community does not abandon religion but transfers its religious allegiance to a reconstructed Buddhism. Baby Kamble writes that this oath “became part of our blood” (Kamble 2008, p. 61)—the most precise statement of somatic continuity in the entire corpus. The body that was the site of inherited caste pollution becomes, through a single collective ritual act, the site of inscribed liberation.

The counter-sacral rupture of 1956 requires a corresponding counter-sacral theology, and it is here that the full theological architecture of Dalit sacred time becomes visible. The Brahminic karma doctrine holds that the Shudra’s suffering is the consequence of moral failings in a previous existence, “If a man is born in a poor family, it is because of his past bad karma… there is no room left for human effort. Everything is predetermined” (Ambedkar 1957, Book Four, Part II). This doctrine inscribes the Mahar’s suffering in a cyclical time from which there is no historical escape, a time of total continuity with a degraded past. Against this, Ambedkar argues, “The conflict between classes is constant and perpetual. It is this which is the root of all sorrow and suffering in the world” (Ambedkar 1957, Book One, Part II). The theological inversion involves not only a shift in the diagnosis of suffering but a shift in the locus of soteriological agency, where Brahminic karma posits the individual soul as the bearer of merit and demerit across rebirths, Navayana posits the social community as the bearer of collective suffering and the agent of collective liberation. The subject of salvation is relocated from the metaphysical atman to the historical community. This is what makes Dalit sacred time collective rather than individual, the “we” of Baby Kamble’s resurrection passage is not a rhetorical plural but a theological claim about the unit of salvation.

The permanent reactivatability of this sacred rupture, the second defining feature of Dalit sacred time, finds its most memorable literary expression not within The Prisons We Broke itself but in a cross-textual echo from Pawar’s Baluta. This cross-textual movement is deliberate: reading the three texts as a corpus reveals how a single image, “the cave”, functions as the structural spine connecting the temporal argument across all three works. When Pawar’s employer demands that he alter the stated reason for compassionate leave following Ambedkar’s death, Pawar replies: “‘Sahib, he was a member of my family. How can you even begin to imagine the dark cave from which he led us?’ And then without bothering whether he granted me leave or not, whether he dismissed me or not, I rushed off to Raj Bhavan” (Pawar 2015, pp. 156–57). The “dark cave” connects directly to the cave imagery of “primitive men” analyzed in Section 4, completing an arc across the entire corpus: the community entered the cave under the baluta system and was led out by Ambedkar’s conversion. The phrase “how can you even begin to imagine” marks the sacred time as community-specific and non-transferable, but it also marks the counter-sacral rupture as permanently available as a source of moral courage, Pawar’s defiance of his employer flows directly from the sacred time he carries. The founding sacred moment is not only available for contemplation but for action. The act of writing the autobiography, composed decades after the events it narrates, is itself the most sustained enactment of this permanent reactivatability. Dalit autobiographical writing is not a monument to a completed rupture but a ritual through which that rupture continues to generate religious energy in the present.

7. Discussion

7.1. The Constitutive Incompleteness of Sacred Rupture

A rigorous account of Dalit sacred time must confront the extensive evidence in all three texts that the liberation promised in 1956 remains incomplete. The conversion to Buddhism did not end caste discrimination; it transformed its form. Pawar’s Baluta registers the persistence of caste logic most sharply, the “neo-Buddhist” designation imposed by caste Hindus reveals the tenacity of caste categories, “When a Hindu converts to Islam or Christianity, how come we don’t hear terms like neo-Christian or neo-Muslim?” (Pawar 2015, p. 159). The cave metaphor recurs with a striking modification, “Some of this generation of Dalits have made economic progress. But the rest live in caves. A deep chasm of consciousness separates these two lots” (Pawar 2015, p. 120). Limbale registers the same reality with defiance, “We are the vanquished. We are fighting another battle against convention. Though we may be defeated in this, there will be yet another battle in which we never surrender” (Limbale 2003, p. 92). Baby Kamble’s testimony about the Republican Party of India’s post-1956 fragmentation provides the most detailed account of political incompleteness (Kamble 2008).

This incompleteness, however, is not a refutation of the counter-sacral rupture but a constitutive feature of it. The dialectic of rupture and continuity that structures Dalit sacred time is not resolved in a final synthesis; it is sustained as an ongoing tension. Because Dalit sacred time is constituted not by a completed liberation but by a founding rupture that permanently opens the possibility of liberation, the non-realization of that liberation in any given historical moment does not invalidate the sacred time itself. The Mahar who remains in the cave now knows that the cave has a door. The rupture of 1956 has permanently altered the temporal horizon within which caste discrimination is experienced, it is now experienced as an injustice to be overcome rather than a cosmic order to be accepted. The sacred time’s power lies not in its guarantee of liberation but in its permanent availability as a resource for its pursuit. Continuity here is not stasis but the ongoing reactivation of the rupture’s transformative potential.

7.2. Theoretical Contribution: Dalit Sacred Time as a Model of Counter-Sacrality

This article has proposed Dalit sacred time as a distinct analytical model, developed as a critical modification of Eliade’s sacred time framework and enriched by Durkheimian, post-Durkheimian, and Rambovian resources. The model’s three defining features, retrospective sanctification, permanent reactivatability, and immanent orientation, each encode the dialectic of rupture and continuity that the article’s title announces. Retrospective sanctification preserves the past by redeeming it. Permanent reactivatability sustains the rupture by making it perpetually accessible. Immanent orientation keeps the sacred within history rather than beyond it.

The model’s contribution to the study of religion and literature is threefold. First, it demonstrates that subaltern communities do not merely resist dominant sacred orders but actively produce counter-sacral imaginaries with their own theological architecture. The three Mahar texts examined here are not simply anti-Brahminic; they are constructively Navayana Buddhist. Second, the model shows that literary texts, autobiographies, life writing, testimonio, can function as the primary vehicles of theological production in communities without institutional access to formal theological discourse. When Baby Kamble identifies Ambedkar as “our Buddha who taught love, brotherhood and equality unto all”, she is doing theology. When Pawar writes of the “dark cave from which he led us”, he is articulating a soteriology. When Limbale figures his midnight crisis as parallel to Siddhartha’s departure from the palace, he is performing retrospective sanctification at the level of narrative form. Third, the model engages directly with the Special Issue’s theme of continuity and contestation in the relationship between literature and religion: the three texts demonstrate how literary practice can simultaneously contest a dominant religious tradition and constitute a new one.

7.3. Comparative Implications

The Dalit sacred time framework may prove applicable beyond the South Asian case. African American religious scholarship has long grappled with how communities constitute sacred temporality out of the history of slavery and liberation, a founding trauma simultaneously retrospectively sanctified and permanently reactivated through commemorative practice (Raboteau 1978; Cone 1975). The structural parallel is significant, though also importantly limited: the Exodus paradigm in African American Christianity is a biblical event recovered through scriptural reading, while 1956 is a contemporary event experienced within living memory. The difference in temporal distance between the founding event and its commemorative practice is itself theoretically significant for the model. Indigenous religious revitalization movements offer a further comparative site, where founding traumas are similarly worked into sacred temporalities oriented toward immanent social recovery (Irwin 1997). In both cases, the dialectic of rupture and continuity is structurally analogous to what this article has identified in the Mahar texts, communities that have experienced catastrophic disruption of their social and religious worlds do not simply mourn what was lost but actively reconstitute a sacred order from the materials of their historical suffering. The present article makes no claim to subsume these cases under a single model; rather, the Dalit sacred time framework and the concept of counter-sacrality offer conceptual tools that may sharpen comparative analysis of how subaltern communities generate religious meaning from historical suffering.

The most compact formulation of this article’s theoretical contribution: Dalit sacred time is the sacred time of communities for whom the beginning of the world was not a cosmogony but a conversion, not a return to an origin but a rupture with an origin that had been used to justify their dehumanization. In this rupture, which is simultaneously a continuity with a reconstructed tradition, lies the generative core of a counter-sacral religious imagination that Mahar Dalit life writing has produced with remarkable theological sophistication.