In 1888, a retired soldier in Bombay started a monthly magazine for readers nobody else was writing for: India’s untouchable communities. Gopal Baba Walangkar had spent his career in the British Indian Army. He spent the rest of his life fighting caste discrimination, decades before Dr. B.R. Ambedkar took up the same cause.
✅ Who He Was
A Soldier Who Became a Reformer
- Community Gopal Baba Walangkar (1840–1904) belonged to the Mahar community, treated as untouchable across much of Maharashtra.
- Army Service He served in the British Indian Army before retiring to devote himself full-time to social reform.
- Status He is generally considered the pioneer of the organised movement against untouchability in India, active well before Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s own rise.
✅ The Vital-Vidhvansak
India’s First Journal for Untouchable Readers
- 1888 Walangkar began publishing Vital-Vidhvansak, meaning “Destroyer of Ceremonial Pollution.”
- A First It was the first monthly journal to have untouchable people as its target audience.
- Language The journal was published in Marathi, reaching readers directly rather than through upper-caste intermediaries.
- Purpose It gave untouchable readers a platform to articulate the injustices they faced under the caste system, in their own words.
⚡ His Wider Legacy
Petitions to the British Government
- Army Discrimination Walangkar wrote petitions to the British government highlighting discrimination faced by untouchable soldiers within the army itself.
- Print as a Tool His use of print media to organise a community was an early template that later anti-caste reformers built on.
- See Also The Satya Shodhak Samaj, founded a generation earlier by Jyotiba Phule, ran a parallel anti-caste movement in Maharashtra. See Satya Shodhak Samaj: Phule’s Anti-Caste Movement.
Test Yourself
📝 Previous Year Questions
UPSC CSP 2020 — The Vital-Vidhvansak’s Publisher
- UPSC 2020 The correct answer is Gopal Baba Walangkar. He published the Vital-Vidhvansak in 1888, the first monthly journal to have untouchable people as its target audience. Asked as: “The Vital-Vidhvansak, the first monthly journal to have the untouchable people as its target audience was published by…” (UPSC CSP 2020, GS Paper I).
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