Editing Adi-Hindu Movement (section)

== Origins ==

The movement took its name from the claim that the untouchable castes were the ''adi'' (original) inhabitants of India, a claim also expressed in the Hindi phrase ''mool bharatvasi'' ("original inhabitants of India").<ref name="Hunt2014">Hunt, Sarah Beth (2014). ''Hindi Dalit Literature and the Politics of Representation''. New Delhi: Routledge. Hunt spells the founder's name "Achutanand" and the monk's "Bodhanand", and calls the writer "Chandrikaprasad Jigyasu"; Gooptu writes "Acchutanand" and "Chandrika Prasad Jijnasu" (see below). Hunt gives his pen-name as meaning "one who is curious". This page uses the spellings Achhutanand, Bodhananda, and Chandrika Prasad Jigyasu throughout and records the variants once. Because ''jigyasu'' is also an ordinary Hindi word, the surname is always given with the first names.</ref> Gooptu locates the origin of Adi-Hindu ideology in the early 1920s, among literate untouchables who left the Arya Samaj, the Hindu reform movement that had at first attracted them. She gives several reasons: the Samaj's continued emphasis on the Vedas and the varna order; its practice of ''shuddhi'' (ritual purification), which implied that untouchables had been impure; its image as an army of high-caste Hindus; and the 1919 reforms, which gave representation by population and so encouraged the Samaj's purification campaigns.<ref name="Gooptu2001">Gooptu, Nandini (2001). ''The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century India''. Cambridge University Press, pp. 155–157.</ref> She traces the theory of a pre-Aryan population to British ethnography and census-taking and to Christian missionary teaching, and finds no evidence of links to the Adi Dravida or Ad Dharm movements in their early stages.<ref>Gooptu (2001), ''Politics of the Urban Poor'', p. 158.</ref> Hunt describes Achhutanand's achievement as uniting the untouchable ''jatis'' (castes) as descendants of India's original inhabitants, inverting the contrast between "indigenous" and "foreign". She adds that he was influenced by Jotiba Phule but did not direct his attack at Brahmins alone, and that he kept the Arya Samaj's institution of itinerant preachers (''upadeshaks'').<ref>Hunt (2014), ''Hindi Dalit Literature'', pp. 32–33.</ref>

Hunt also describes an earlier tradition that the Adi-Hindu writers displaced. The first Dalit pamphlets, from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were caste histories that supported petitions to be classed as Kshatriya in the census; Hunt argues that Dalit pamphlet literature proper begins with the Adi-Hindu writers, who rejected caste and varna and presented themselves as non-Hindu.<ref>Hunt (2014), ''Hindi Dalit Literature'', pp. 27–31.</ref>