Bahujan Samaj Movement

The Satyashodhak Samaj later on turned out to be socially and politically divisive and loyalist, when the Maharaja (Shahu) of Kolhapur, who was having problems with his Brahman courtiers, patronised it. So did the British. They supported this movement, and also the Maharaja of Kolhapur, with the objective of creating an anti-Congress front against Bal Gangadar Tilak.

After 1919, Bhaskar Rao Jadhav, inspired by the ideas of Jyotiba Phule, formed an anti-Brahman and strongly anti-Congress party, which attacked the caste system and claimed to speak for the Bahujan Samaj against the money-lenders and Brahmans. From 1920 Mukundrao Patil began to publish a Satyashodhak paper, Din-Mitra, and soon the Bahujan Samaj established a powerful rural base in Maharashtra, the Deccan and the Vidarbha-Nagpur region. The Satyashodhak message was spread in the countryside through tamasha-the folk drama tradition of Maharashtra.