Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Ahir" in English language version.
Ahirs willingly subjected themselves to Sanskritisation because of their special relation to sacred cow but alas because the Arya Samaj exerted significant Sanskritising influence over the Yadav movement. As early as 1895, the ruler of Rewari, Rao Yudhishter Singh ( the father of Rao Bahadur Balbir Singh), invited Swami Dayananda to his state. Branches of the Arya Samaj flourished soon after and Rewari provided a base from which Arya Samaj updeshaks (itinerant preachers) operated in neighbouring areas.
Apart from their physique , the martial races were regarded as politically subservient or docile to authority
The Saturday review had made much the same argument a few years earlier in relation to the armies raised by Indian rulers in princely states. They lacked competent leadership and were uneven in quality. Commander in chief Roberts, one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the martial race theory, though poorly of the native troops as a body. Many regarded such troops as childish and simple. The British, claims, David Omissi, believe martial Indians to be stupid. Certainly, the policy of recruiting among those without access to much education gave the British more semblance of control over their recruits.
Dr . Jeffrey Greenhunt has observed that " The Martial Race Theory had an elegant symmetry. Indians who were intelligent and educated were defined as cowards, while those defined as brave were uneducated and backward. Besides their mercenary spirit was primarily due to their lack of nationalism.
One of the most politically active and vocal among the shudra castes was the ahirs or yadavs. In 1922, an ahir conference was held in Lucknow, followed by another ahir mahotsav (festival) in Allahabad in 1923, where a provincial Mahasabha was inaugurated, with the new name of Yadav Mahasabha. The term yadav, to denote the ahirs, gained currency from this period. Rajit Singh, a yadav born in the Deoria district in 1897, and educated at Gorakhpur and Shikohabad, was instrumental in the formation of the Yadav Mahasabha. He had briefly worked in the Excise Department in Kanpur, but had resigned from his job to devote himself to organising yadav associations from 1921. In 1925, Rajit Singh settled in Benares and inaugurated the Benares Yadav Mahasabha, which soon emerged as the centre of the yadav caste movement in UP. From Benares, Rajit Singh edited the journal Yadav, and also published a history of the yadav castes, entitled Yaduvamsa Prakash. Several other yadav histories were published in rapid succession in the 1920s, written by another younger yadav leader of Benares, Mannalal Abhimanyu, a lawyer who was the son of a school teacher. He wrote Ahir Vamsa Pradip (1925) and Yadukul Sarvasya (1928), in which he attempted to demonstrate the kshatriya origin of the yadavs, with extensive references from both religious texts and British ethnographic tracts.
Hindu reformist organisations like the Arya Samaj which aimed to reform Hinduism and incorporate lower-caste groups within the fold of vedic Aryan Hinduism (see Rao 1979: 132-35), have a pivotal role in 'purifying' the customs of the Ahir/Yadavs and other lower castes through the adoption of Brahmanical Hindu practices. Brahmanical Hinduism emphasises vegetarianism, non-violence and ascetism (Fuller 1992: 88).
In U.P., the Ahir/Yadav castes, whom elites deemed Shudras, also used shastrarth debates to defend their claims to elevated, Kshatriya status from at least the 1890s. In the eastern districts of U.P., monks of the Vaishnava Ramanandi order defended the Ahirs' claims in public debate; in western U.P., their champions in debate were often members of the Arya Samaj.
This emphasis on number and on Yadavness versus 'status' is also evident in colonial petitions which portray the Ahirs as a 'backward/ depressed category' in an attempt to get benefits from the reservation provisions. It looks as if the Yadav intelligentsia not only learnt that Yadav social and economic progress or backwardness could be determined by measuring their share in the number of graduates, official appointments and parliamentary seats (Chakrabarty 1994: 150), but also that economic and social disabilities were not 'enough' and that 'ritual' disabilities had also to be proved. The political leaders invoked arguments about the historical deprivation of their communities' (see Gooptu 2001: 11). The following is an extract from a petition sent in 1927 to the Simon Commission, in which a member of the Ahir community illustrates how the community suffers from the same disabilities and discriminations as the Chamars (an untouchable caste).
Although Yadav caste associations organise Other Backward Classes meetings and explicitly express their commitment against untouchability, I never met an SC member attending or delivering a speech at such events. A recent controversy showed how, in practice, Yadav caste associations are not willing to encompass in their social category members of SC communities who claim to descend from Krishna. At the AIYM meeting held in Gurgaon in 1998, a member of the committee raised the issue that Jatavs in Agra and Rajasthan had begun to adopt the Yadav title. A member of the audience pointed out that he had already written to the Mahasabha secretary to inform him that in Bharatpur (Rajasthan) the local Jatavs were calling themselves Yadavs. Another pointed out that in Udaipur, Jatavs who worked as builders and did casual labour were also calling themselves Yadavs and had adopted the Kadamb Yadav clan.
The spread of the tanzeem movement in Benares further fuelled the religious expansion of Hindu organisations, and contributed to an escalation in local competition and communal conflict. Khalil Das' movement elicited a counter-reaction from the Arya Samaj and from such Hindu shudra caste groups as the ahirs, who were active participants in volunteer corps and akharas, and who, in Benares, were involved in an especially active yadav caste movement.... The Ahirs in particular who played an important role in militant Hinduism, retaliated strongly against the Tanzeem movement. In July,1930, about 200 Ahirs marched in procession to Trilochan, a sacred Hindu site and performed a religious ceremony in response to Tanzeem processions.
Gyan Pandey's detailed research on the cow protection riots in eastern UP and Bihar in 1893 and 1917 relates the conflict to specific registers of caste difference and status assertion, in a context where the popular view of cow protection from the point of view of low-caste Ahirs, Koeris and Kurmis was quite different to that of UP's urban elites. For both Freitag and Pandey, cow protection became a means for relatively low-status communities to assert higher status via association with something of symbolic importance to Hinduism as a whole: in this case, the cow.
