The Mahad satyagraha

A resolution moved by S. K. Bole in the Bombay Legislative Council in 1923 opened public tanks, wells and schools to the depressed classes, and Mahad's municipality declared its Chavdar tank open to all the next year. Caste Hindus still kept Dalits away from it. At a conference in Mahad on 19 and 20 March 1927, B. R. Ambedkar led several thousand delegates to the tank, and they drank from it.

A rumour that they meant to enter a temple brought a caste Hindu crowd down on the delegates, and afterwards Brahmins purified the tank with cow dung, urine, milk and curd. Ambedkar called a second conference for 25 December. With a court injunction in force he held back from a march to the tank, and instead the conference burned a copy of the Manusmriti, the law book that ranked the castes. Ambedkarites mark 25 December as Manusmriti Dahan Din.

The civil suit dragged on for ten years until the Bombay High Court ruled in March 1937 that caste Hindus had not proved a customary right to keep untouchables from the tank. Mahad was Ambedkar's first mass campaign, and it set his politics apart from the Congress's: rights by law, not change of heart.