Untouchability – Forms and Perspectives

Defining Untouchability

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• Untouchability’s precise historical origin remains genuinely uncertain, but its administrative and legal definition has a traceable history. Until the early 1930s, the groups later termed “Scheduled Castes” were officially known as the “depressed classes,” defined administratively through the religious concept of pollution — as “Hindu castes, contact with whom entails purification on the part of high-caste Hindus.” Census Commissioner J.H. Hutton, working on the 1931 Census, developed a set of criteria to identify these depressed classes; the criteria proved unworkable in practice and required adjustment before the formal schedule was finally promulgated in 1935.
• Professor Satyavrata defined untouchability precisely: “that system of society on account of which one individual cannot touch another individual, and one society cannot touch another society, on the basis of convention, and if so touches, becomes profane and, in order to remove that profanity, has to perform penance.” D.N. Majumdar offered a related but more institutional definition: “the untouchable castes are those who suffer from various social and political disabilities, many of which are traditionally prescribed and socially enforced by higher castes.”
• Untouchability can be understood from two distinct angles, and the distinction matters for how it is studied.
  • The stigma attached to certain people because of the ceremonial pollution they are alleged to convey — a status ascribed at birth, lasting a lifetime, and (on the traditional logic) incapable of being removed by any individual rite or deed.
  • The set of practices the rest of society engages in specifically to protect itself from that alleged pollution — restrictions on touch, water, temple entry, and public facility access.
• Though the Indian Constitution formally outlawed untouchability and the Untouchability (Offences) Act, 1955 made its practice a legal offence, the underlying concern with ritual purity and pollution has remained sufficiently embedded in social life that the practice has not been fully eradicated, even where it has receded from open, public enforcement.
• Untouchability’s textual history is itself contested. The Vedas mention Savarna and Avarna categories, and two types of Savarna (Dwija, twice-born, and Adwija), along with groups such as the Chandalas — but without spelling out the specific stigma of pollution later attached to them. It is in later texts, including the Manusmriti and the Bhrigu Samhita — composed by Brahmin authors with an evident interest in elevating their own ritual status — that untouchability as a codified concept of impurity becomes explicit. Read this way, the identification of certain groups as permanently “impure” was substantially a Brahmanical construction serving to institutionalize Brahmin ritual superiority, rather than a feature present in the earliest strata of Hindu textual tradition.

The Social and Economic Reality of Untouchability

• The social stigma of untouchability has historically manifested across virtually every domain of life: denial of temple access, denial of Brahmin ritual services, and social avoidance by higher castes generally, producing a status born as impure and, on the traditional logic, lived as impure for life.
• This concern with ritual pollution never operated in isolation from economic and political subordination — the same logic of physical separation that enforced ritual purity also functioned to keep untouchable communities economically and politically marginal.
• Two structural features have historically characterized Dalits’ position in rural India specifically: most Dalit households neither own land nor hold secure tenancy, and most Dalit income derives from labouring on others’ land, frequently through ongoing attachment to specific landholding cultivators rather than open wage employment.
  • Demand for Dalit agricultural labour has historically tracked the agricultural cycle closely (peaking at harvest) and the intensity of cultivation (rising with more irrigated land, more capital, more fertilizer use), while the arrival of tractors and other modern implements has simultaneously increased demand for select skilled labour and reduced the total number of labourers needed.
  • Because landlords draw labour from both Dalit and non-Dalit sources, and have historically shown a documented preference for non-Dalit labour (widely rationalized as non-Dalits being “more hardworking,” a judgment with no empirical basis but real economic consequences), Dalit agricultural labour in particular has been described in the literature as structurally “marginal” — the last hired, the first let go.
• Even where formal disabilities have eased, structural distance has narrowed only partially. Sachchidananda’s 1976 study of the emerging Harijan elite in Bihar documented persistent resentment and jealousy directed at Dalits who succeeded in professions such as medicine, engineering, and administration — attributed partly to older stereotyped hostility and partly to genuine competitive anxiety generated by protective-discrimination policy. A large number of Dalits, per this literature, also carry an internalized sense of inferiority that heightens sensitivity to any treatment perceived as discriminatory — though this does not mean every specific allegation of discrimination is, in every instance, accurate; both dynamics coexist.

Three Perspectives on Untouchability

• The Gandhian perspective is reformist. Gandhi treated untouchability as a crime against both God and humanity, grounded in his conviction that every human being is a child of God and therefore fundamentally equal in the eyes of God — a value he located within Hindu Dharmashastra itself rather than importing from outside it.
  • He read untouchability as a product of an aggressive, individualistic, materialistic distortion of the caste system, while paradoxically still defending the underlying Varna system as, properly understood, a framework for hereditary occupational learning that did not itself require ranking one occupation as superior or inferior to another. Division of labour, on his reading, properly produced self-sufficiency and social harmony rather than hierarchy.
  • His reform programme included admitting untouchables to Hindu temples, encouraging inter-dining, and urging higher castes to personally take up occupations associated with untouchables so as to directly experience their conditions — renaming untouchables “Harijans” (children of God) as part of this broader project of integrating Hindus around shared humanistic values rather than dismantling caste as a structure outright. His approach, in substance, closely paralleled the earlier SNDP reform movement’s ideology: untouchability as a historic mistake correctable through reform, compassion, and expanded social integration.
  • Harold Gould directly challenged this reading. On Gould’s account, the socio-religious movements of untouchables historically were not a search for equality with Brahminic and Sanskritic groups, granted as a form of grace or concession — they were a protest, asserting that untouchables could equally command Brahmanic and Sanskritic values on their own terms. On this reading, equality was never something to be conferred; it was a right to be claimed, which reframes reform itself as a form of protest rather than a plea for concession.
• The dialectical (materialist) perspective holds that no economically empowered group has ever, historically, also been subjected to systematic social and cultural discrimination — the two conditions are treated as mutually exclusive, which means untouchability’s roots must be sought in material dispossession rather than in religious ideology alone. On this account, India’s untouchable communities were plausibly the original inhabitants of the subcontinent, subjected over time to territorial and political conquest that stripped them of land and, consequently, livelihood; the resulting dominant landholding class then pushed them physically to village margins and imposed specific occupational and behavioural bans (on tree planting, cattle milking, independent agriculture) that entrenched their poverty structurally, with a religious ideology of purity and pollution supplied afterward to justify and naturalize an arrangement whose real origin was economic exclusion. David Hardiman situates the Dalit movement in India within the same broad category as the mobilization of Black communities in Europe and the Americas — both, on his reading, are manifestations of underlying economic exploitation that subsequently generate other, compounding forms of social exploitation.
• The contemporary perspective draws substantially on Ambedkar. Ambedkar treated untouchability’s intensity as context-dependent rather than uniform, and approached it, in his own words, with more hesitancy and emotional intensity than his comparatively more confident theoretical treatment of caste as a general institution — grief merging with anger at how such an institution could be tolerated, let alone actively defended, for so long.
  • He drew a clear analytical distinction between untouchability and caste as such, while insisting the two reinforce each other and that Brahmanism constitutes the shared underlying target of critique for both. He found the record of colonial administration on untouchability unimpressive, and was equally unconvinced that Islam or Christianity’s official doctrinal rejection of untouchability translated into meaningfully better lived treatment of converts from untouchable backgrounds.
  • Ambedkar insisted that untouchables must fight their own battle, and that genuine solidarity from others should take the form of helping them fight, not prescribing solutions on their behalf. He rejected Gandhi’s approach directly and sharply, describing it as a form of pretense that sought to manage untouchables through kindness rather than confront the structural sources of their subordination, and he actively warned untouchables against what he saw as the trap of “Gandhism,” urging them instead to organize for independent political power.
  • He compared the position of India’s untouchables to that of slaves and of Jews historically, and judged untouchables’ position, on balance, to be worse — universally despised, confined to what amounted to ghettos, and denied even the more limited paths to formal legal recognition those other groups eventually secured.
  • On untouchability’s origin, Ambedkar was characteristically cautious, explicitly rejecting both racial explanations and any simple identification of caste’s origin with race. In one specific and unusually speculative argument, he proposed that untouchables may have originally been “broken men” living on village peripheries who, by refusing to abandon Buddhism and continuing to eat beef, came to be marked and condemned as untouchable — a thesis he floated once, in the specific political context of fighting for untouchables’ constitutional recognition, and did not return to as a settled position.

Untouchability as Practised

• The Constitution’s abolition of untouchability in 1950 did not, in practice, bring the centuries-old set of practices to a clean end. Dalits — roughly one-fifth of India’s population — continue to report birth-based discrimination and humiliation in multiple, well-documented forms.
  • Denial of access to public roads, water tanks, temples, and cremation grounds persists in parts of rural India, alongside broader patterns of residential and social segregation, even as constitutional prohibition and the general pressures of modernization and development have measurably blunted its severity relative to earlier decades.
  • Manual scavenging remains the most visible and persistent surviving form of caste-based occupational disability. Despite the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and Their Rehabilitation Act, 2013 and repeated Supreme Court directives ordering its elimination, the practice continues: documented deaths from manual scavenging and hazardous sewage-line and septic-tank cleaning totalled roughly 158 between 2024 and 2025 alone, with Rajasthan recording over fifteen such deaths since March 2025 alone, and further fatal incidents recorded in 2025 in Sikar (Rajasthan, including a thirteen-year-old victim) and Tiruppur (Tamil Nadu, three workers). Workers performing this labour remain drawn overwhelmingly from specific Dalit sub-castes, making manual scavenging less an occupational accident of poverty than a directly caste-assigned form of labour.
  • Documented transport-related violations include informal norms in some areas giving caste Hindus priority boarding over Dalit passengers, and instances of transport staff targeting Dalit passengers without provocation.
  • In schools, Dalit students have reported being discouraged by upper-caste teachers and peers, denial of shared water access with upper-caste students, and, in some documented instances, outright refusal of school admission.
  • National Crime Records Bureau data records a substantial ongoing volume of atrocity cases: over 2.6 lakh cases of atrocities against Scheduled Castes were recorded, alongside roughly 42,500 cases against Scheduled Tribes that proceeded to trial, with over 12,000 ST-related cases still pending investigation as of the most recent reporting period — figures that indicate a persistent, high-volume pattern rather than a residual or declining one.

The Emergence of Dalit Consciousness

• The term “Dalit” (meaning “broken” or “oppressed”) traces to Mahatma Jyotiba Phule’s original usage, later revived and popularized after 1975, when Namdeo Dhasal, Raja Dhale, and other Dalit literary figures and youth activists launched the Dalit Panther movement, explicitly modelled on the Black Panther movement in the United States.
• Demographic scale: per the 2011 Census, Dalits constitute 17.1 percent of India’s population nationally, with sharp regional concentration — 28 percent of Punjab’s population, 24 percent of West Bengal’s, and 19 percent of Uttar Pradesh’s; in absolute numbers, Uttar Pradesh holds the largest Dalit population (over 40 million), followed by West Bengal and Bihar. Roughly half of India’s total Scheduled Caste population is concentrated in five Hindi-belt states: Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Haryana.
• Dalit identity has become politically significant not primarily because of raw population share, but because of sustained assertion — consistent, self-directed movement in social, political, and cultural terms. Legal sanctions against discrimination, combined with electoral reservation for Scheduled Castes, created accessible avenues for political and constitutional rights claims in the post-independence period, and the combination of legal-democratic rights with substantial numerical strength has allowed Dalit political mobilization to convert demographic weight into genuine political leverage.
• Historically, untouchables did not simply accept imposed disabilities passively; several distinct channels of active resistance and mobility recur across the historical record: shamanism (specialized ritual or healing skills that forced higher castes to seek untouchables’ services); migration; participation in the Bhakti movement; conversion to Islam or Christianity; sanskritisation; and organized movements such as the Satnami movement in Punjab, the Jatav movement in Agra, and the SNDP (Sri Narayana Dharma Paripalana) movement in Kerala, which organized around refusing untouchable-designated occupations (scavenging, skinning), enrolling children in schools, adopting ritually “pure” food practices, and establishing an independent temple for untouchables.
• Yogendra Singh distinguished two orientations within Scheduled Caste social movements. Movements with an integrative orientation — chiefly sanskritisation — sought upward mobility by imitating upper-caste customs, without renouncing caste stratification as a system; these met with only partial success, since legitimate acceptance by upper castes rarely followed however completely the imitation was performed. Movements with an alienating orientation rejected the imitative strategy altogether, instead consolidating horizontally across Scheduled Caste sub-groups into a unified, independent political identity — reflected in the rise of Dalit-based political parties, most prominently the Bahujan Samaj Party, and in a broader shift from seeking upward assimilation toward asserting an independent, self-defined identity less dependent on upper-caste validation.
• Ambedkar’s own 1956 mass conversion to Buddhism, followed shortly after his death by his followers’ formation of the Republican Party of India, represents a third, explicitly religio-political path — moving away from caste affiliation altogether rather than either imitating or purely opposing it from within Hinduism. Kancha Ilaiah’s Why I Am Not a Hindu pushes this logic further still, treating Dalit identity as categorically prior to, and stronger than, any religious identity that might be claimed alongside or instead of it.

The Present Discourse: Exclusion, Not Just Pollution

• Contemporary Dalit discourse has shifted its centre of gravity from the language of ritual pollution toward the language of exclusion. Sukhadeo Thorat frames exclusion as operating through both deliberate intention and indirect institutional design, depriving Dalits of public facilities, social honour, and prestige regardless of which mechanism is operating in a given instance. Badri Narayan documents a concrete contemporary form in Uttar Pradesh, where Dalits have been denied access to marriage halls at the time of their own weddings.
• One influential sociological interpretation, drawing on Eric Stokes, holds that exclusion is rarely genuinely “voluntary” self-withdrawal by marginalized groups (women, minorities, Dalits, Adivasis) — it results either from anticipated fear of negative reaction or reprisal, or from actual reprisal already experienced, which together produce what looks, from outside, like voluntary self-exclusion but is better understood as a rational response to a credible threat environment.
• Manual scavenging functions as this discourse’s clearest present-day test case, discussed above: legal abolition since 2013, judicial pressure for enforcement, and continued, well-documented fatalities together illustrate precisely why untouchability scholarship has moved from asking whether formal disabilities have been abolished (they largely have) to asking whether the underlying material and institutional structures that assign specific caste groups to specific degrading and dangerous occupations have actually been dismantled (the evidence suggests they have not been, at least not fully).

Institutional Response: Reservation and Legal Protection

• India’s constitutional and policy response to caste and untouchability-based discrimination substantially predates independence: the schedules formally listing castes and tribes recognized as deserving special protection because of documented, systematic discrimination were first drawn up by the British Indian government in 1935, building on the earlier Caste Disabilities Removal Act, 1850.
• Post-independence, this framework was both continued and substantially expanded, most significantly through the extension of special developmental and protective programmes to Other Backward Classes from the early 1990s onward, alongside the continuing, and more established, protections for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
• Reservation — the setting aside of seats and positions for SC/ST (and, on a differently calculated basis, OBC) members across legislatures, government employment, and educational institutions — remains the most significant and most contested state instrument for compensating historical caste discrimination. For SCs and STs specifically, the reserved proportion is set equal to each group’s share of the total population; OBC reservation is calculated on a separate basis.
  • Constitutional provisions structuring this framework include Articles 14, 15, 16, and 17 (equality rights generally); Article 15(4) and 16(4) (enabling special provisions and reserved positions for backward classes, SCs, and STs specifically); Article 46 (directing the state to promote SC/ST educational and economic interests); Articles 330 and 332 (reserved seats in the Lok Sabha and state legislative assemblies, respectively, proportional to each state’s SC/ST population); and Article 340 (empowering the President to appoint a commission investigating the difficulties of socially and educationally backward classes).
  • The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 strengthened legal provisions specifically punishing violence and humiliation directed at Dalits and Adivasis — its repeated legislative reinforcement over time is itself evidence, as much as anything else, that legislation alone has not been sufficient to end the underlying practice.
• A significant recent development in this constitutional framework: in August 2024, a seven-judge Constitution Bench of the Supreme Court, by a 6–1 majority, ruled that individual states may sub-classify Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes into separate groups for reservation purposes based on their relative degree of backwardness — reversing the Court’s own 2004 position (in E.V. Chinnaiah v. State of Andhra Pradesh) that the SC/ST list must be treated as a single, internally homogeneous bloc. The Court specified that states cannot reserve 100 percent of quota for any single sub-class, and must justify any sub-classification with quantifiable, demonstrable data on relative representation rather than acting on unsubstantiated assumption; a separate opinion by Justice Gavai additionally called for identifying and excluding a “creamy layer” within SC/ST reservation itself. This ruling reopened, at the highest constitutional level, exactly the question the older “book view” of a uniform, undifferentiated caste hierarchy had obscured: that Scheduled Castes are not internally homogeneous in their actual, present-day economic and social position.
• Looking forward, the Union Cabinet’s 2025 decision to include caste enumeration in India’s next census — the first such exercise since 1931, with the reference date set for March 2027 — is expected to generate, for the first time in nearly a century, comprehensive official data on the demographic and economic position of individual castes and sub-castes, including Other Backward Classes and general-category groups previously uncounted by caste. This data will directly bear on future untouchability policy and reservation design, since much of the current debate — including the 2024 sub-classification ruling — has been constrained by the absence of exactly this kind of granular, current, caste-disaggregated data.
• The broader scholarly consensus, represented by Sachchidananda’s assessment, holds that no single lever — government ameliorative effort, growing Dalit political consciousness, or shifting upper-caste attitudes — is sufficient alone; sustained reduction of untouchability’s remaining disabilities depends on these three forces operating together over an extended period, with no social group, however historically oppressed, functioning purely as a passive victim in that process.