Backward Classes and Dalit Movement in India

The Colonial Backdrop to Backward Class Mobilization

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• The emergence of backward castes and classes as organised political entities occurred across both the colonial and postcolonial periods. Because the colonial state routinely distributed patronage along caste lines, it made practical sense for people to organise their social and political identity around caste itself — encouraging similarly placed caste groups to unite into what has been termed a “horizontal stretch.” In this process, caste steadily lost its purely ritual content and became progressively secularised as a vehicle for political mobilisation.
• The term “Backward Classes” has been in documented use since the late nineteenth century — from 1872 in the Madras Presidency, from 1918 in the princely state of Mysore, and from 1925 in the Bombay Presidency. From the 1920s, organisations explicitly built around caste issues proliferated across the country (the United Provinces Hindu Backward Classes League, the All India Backward Classes Federation, the All India Backward Classes League among them), and by 1954 as many as 88 distinct organisations were counted as working specifically for the Backward Classes.
• Even as the visible position of Dalits and other backward classes has genuinely improved relative to the pre-independence baseline — occupational diversity across all caste groups is now considerably wider than in the past — the underlying structural reality has proven far more resistant to change: the overwhelming majority of people in the most preferred, highest-status occupations remain drawn from upper castes, while the overwhelming majority of those in menial, low-status occupations remain drawn from the lowest castes.

Nature and Forms of Backward Class Movements

• Backward class movements are distinct in kind from religious reform movements: where a religious movement typically attacks the perceived evils of Hinduism itself, a caste movement more often exhorts its followers to seek solutions to their grievances within the framework of Hinduism, without rejecting the religion outright.
• These movements have generally taken one of five forms: protest against discrimination; the pursuit of self-respect, honour, and status; status mobility movements; caste unity movements; and caste welfare movements. Status mobility movements can be further sub-classified into adaptive movements (working within existing religious frameworks to raise status), movements oriented toward cultural revolt, and counter-cultural movements (building an entirely separate, parallel culture rather than seeking absorption into or reform of the mainstream).
• Backward castes suffered genuine relative deprivation across religion, education, economics, and politics for generations before external conditions created an opening for organised awakening: Christian missionary activity directed specifically at the “depressed classes”; the national movement’s own egalitarian ideology, which lent legitimacy to movements against discrimination of any kind; upper-caste-led reform movements that, even while remaining paternalistic, initiated education and welfare programmes against orthodox Brahminical practice; and the egalitarian system of British law, which for the first time gave backward castes a formal opening to protest discrimination through legally sanctioned means.

Three Ideologies of Status Mobility

• M.S.A. Rao identifies three distinct ideological strategies backward castes have used to pursue higher status. The first involved claiming Kshatriya descent — the Gopas of West Bengal, Gaulis of Maharashtra, Gollas of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, and Konars of Tamil Nadu all made such claims, adopting upper-caste lifestyle practices in the process, a pattern M.N. Srinivas famously termed Sanskritisation. Imtiaz Ahmad frames this mobility process as simultaneously an initiative, a protest, and a form of counter-mobilisation — one upper castes routinely resisted; by 1931 the strategy had extended to formally lobbying census officials to record a caste’s ritual status as higher than previously recorded.
• The second ideology was outright rejection of Brahminical Aryan religion and culture — the Dravida Kazhagam movement in Tamil Nadu being the paradigm case. The third was abandoning Hinduism altogether for another religion, exemplified by the Mahars of Maharashtra; the Nadars of Tamil Nadu instead pursued political influence, and the Malis of Maharashtra pursued cultural revolt as their chosen route to higher status.
• T.K. Oommen identifies the structural preconditions that made status-mobility movements viable for some castes and not others: not being ritually at the very bottom of the hierarchy; comparative local economic prosperity; substantial numerical strength combined with ruler support in some regions (the Maharaja of Kolhapur being a notable patron); occupational diversification; exposure to education and urbanisation; and, not least, outstanding, charismatic leadership.

The Self-Respect Movement and Periyar

• Tamil Nadu’s ethnic and status-mobility movement traces a documented organisational lineage: the Dravidian Mahajan Sabha (founded by Natesar and T.N. Nair as an early secularising movement against Brahminical domination — refusing to call Brahmins for rites, sending children to school instead of insisting on ritual observance) evolved into the South Indian Liberation Front (SILF), a non-Brahmin political outfit that won 60% of seats in Madras in 1917.
• E.V. Ramaswami “Periyar” Naicker joined Congress in 1920 but left in 1925 over its refusal to accept the reservation principle, dissolved the SILF, and founded the Justice Party to convert a narrower caste movement into a genuinely mass movement — advancing girls’ education, family planning, and refusal to perform Brahmin-mandated ritual obligations. Its core ideal, “Sama Dharma” (equal law/righteousness), envisioned a cultural, classless, egalitarian society, extending to a (never realised) demand for a separate Dravidian country. Periyar’s underlying critique paralleled, in structure if not intent, Max Weber’s account of the Protestant ethic: just as Weber’s Protestants looked beyond divine intervention and toward rational, this-worldly action to improve their condition, Periyar’s Dravidian movement rejected ritual as the vehicle of change in favour of deliberate rational and political action — captured in the movement’s own maxim that “no work is high or low, but one should not do work which others refuse to do.”
• The organisational lineage continued from the Self-Respect Movement into the DMK, under Periyar’s successor Annadurai, and subsequently MGR and Karunanidhi — making this a genuinely “total” movement in the sense that it left a mark on nearly every sphere of Tamil society: women’s status, land relations, children’s education, the regional economy, and formal politics alike.

Satyashodhak Samaj and the Sri Narayana Dharma Paripalana Movement

• Jyotiba Phule’s Satyashodhak Samaj combined cultural revivalism with agrarian radicalism and an explicit dismissal of the mainstream nationalist movement of the time, using reconstructed myth (the story of Raja Bali as the original, indigenous ruler displaced by “Aryan” outsiders) to explain caste subordination as a story of external conquest rather than natural or religiously ordained hierarchy. Malinowski’s framing of myth as a “charter of society” — stories that need not be literally true to bind people together through what Durkheim would call a shared conscience collective — captures precisely how Phule’s reconstructed origin-myth supplied both an identity and an ideology around which collective mobilisation could organise itself.
• In Kerala, Sri Narayana Guru’s SNDP movement among the Ezhavas (traditionally toddy-tappers) took a related but distinct tack: Narayana Guru argued that caste pollution was not an accident of birth but a product of occupation, lifestyle, and dress — a position that opened space for reform through changed practice rather than only through religious rejection. The SNDP opened schools, preached personal hygiene, discouraged degrading occupations, and — in a direct symbolic challenge to Brahminical monopoly over ritual authority — opened temples with Dalits installed as priests.

The Yadava Movement: Regional Variation in Strategy

• Shahu Maharaj founded the All India Yadav Gowli Association in Maharashtra in 1902, seeking to unify pastoralist communities — Ahirs, Gawarias, Gaudas, Golas, Govils, Yadavs — under a shared Yaduvanshi identity; because these communities were too geographically dispersed and occupationally varied for the census to consistently classify them as a single caste or tribe, full integration ultimately failed.
• The movement’s strategy varied sharply by region: in Haryana, Yadav mobilisation pursued Sanskritisation (inspired by the Arya Samaj) and surname changes; in Maharashtra, it pursued secularisation and education instead; and in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar it pursued direct political mobilisation and the capture of state power — a strategy that succeeded in producing outsized political influence despite Yadavs constituting only around 9–12% of the population in these states.

Counter-Cultural Movements and the Limits of Sanskritization

• Not every caste achieved higher status while remaining within the Hindu fold, prompting some — most visibly the Mahars of Maharashtra — to embrace Buddhism instead. Among those that did pursue change from within Hinduism, counter-cultural movements took two distinguishable forms: developing an oppositional counter-culture against Brahminical supremacy while still remaining nominally within the Hindu fold (the Dravidian movement’s approach), versus building an entirely new, parallel culture rather than seeking absorption into or even direct confrontation with the mainstream — the approach exemplified by Maharashtra’s Dalit Panther movement.
• The Dravidian movement itself developed in two distinct phases: an initial anti-Brahmin (caste) phase, in which Brahmins were cast as Aryan outsiders and Brahminical puranas and varnashram dharma were ridiculed as irrational, denouncing practices like idol worship, child marriage, and enforced widowhood; and a later anti-North (regional) phase, in which the movement’s target shifted from Brahminical dominance specifically to North Indian political dominance more broadly, culminating in the (ultimately abandoned) demand for a sovereign Dravidian state.
• Where the Dravidian movement remained geographically confined to Tamil Nadu, the Dalit Panther movement spread outward from urban Maharashtra to other states, emphasising intellectual awakening and consciousness-raising among the oppressed over electoral or institutional strategy — while the broader trajectory of backward-caste mobilisation nonetheless provided a durable organisational template that other, forward castes’ own reform associations (focused on opposing child marriage, encouraging widow remarriage and women’s education) subsequently drew on as well.

The Dalit Movement: Meaning and Historical Trajectory

• Untouchables within the Hindu caste system are officially designated Scheduled Castes; Gandhi coined the term “Harijan” (“children of God”) for this category in 1933, though the term has since acquired negative connotations and members of these castes now overwhelmingly prefer to be called Dalit (“the oppressed” or “the broken”) — a term first used in this specific political sense in Marathi by neo-Buddhist activists following Ambedkar in the early 1970s, carrying within it a direct rejection of the notion that pollution, karma, or caste hierarchy could ever justify oppression.
• Dalit movements, alongside the broader category of non-Brahman movements, emerged during the pre-independence period as a distinct current within India’s wider landscape of social movements — non-Brahman movements concentrated particularly in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, while Dalit movements proper spread across the whole country: the Adi Dharma movement in Punjab, the Satnami movement in Uttar Pradesh (and the Chhattisgarh plains of eastern Madhya Pradesh, among the Chamars), Narayan Guru’s movement in Kerala, and the Adi-Dravida movement in Tamil Nadu were among the most significant, with Jyotiba Phule, B.R. Ambedkar, and E.V. Ramaswami Periyar the movement’s most prominent all-India leaders, each attacking caste exploitation at every level.
• Ghanshyam Shah makes a crucial methodological point: there has never been a single, unified Dalit movement, either historically or today. Different regional movements have foregrounded different issues under different ideological banners — the Satnami movement of the Chamars, the Adi Dharma movement in Punjab, the Mahar movement in Maharashtra, socio-political mobilisation among the Jatavas of Agra, and the Anti-Brahman movement in the south are all genuinely distinct — yet all share a common underlying quest for equality, self-dignity, and the eradication of untouchability, even where the precise meaning of “Dalit identity” is not identical across them.

Ambedkar and the Institutionalization of Dalit Politics

• The Dalit movement is inseparably linked to B.R. Ambedkar, its historical leader and founding ideologue. Initially confined to Maharashtra, the movement spread nationally through the 1930s and 1940s; although the organisations Ambedkar founded — the Scheduled Caste Federation (1942) and its successor, the Republican Party of India (1957, formed after his death) — never achieved genuine all-India electoral status, their ideas shaped local-level Dalit movements across the country. The cumulative effect has been the growth of authentic Dalit self-consciousness as a distinct political group, no longer politically dependent on upper-caste patronage, and increasingly able to shape the actual structure of power in India.
• The Dalit Panther movement, launched by young Dalits in Maharashtra in the early 1970s, initially confined to urban Maharashtra before spreading to other states, denounced dominant caste-Hindu culture outright and worked to articulate an alternative cultural identity for the oppressed — propagated substantially through Dalit literature (poems, stories, plays) that directly challenged the intellectual and aesthetic traditions of upper-caste Hindu literary culture, insisting on imagery and expression rooted in Dalits’ own lived experience rather than borrowing the “high-flown” idioms of mainstream literary convention, which many Dalit writers felt would obscure rather than reveal the truth of their condition.

The Character of Dalit Struggle

• Dalit social movements resist explanation purely in terms of economic exploitation or political oppression, even though both dimensions matter — the struggle is, at its core, also a struggle for recognition as fellow human beings, for self-confidence and space for self-determination, for the abolition of the stigmatisation that untouchability implies, and — in a formulation that captures its most visceral dimension — a struggle simply “to be touched.”
• The movement’s most consequential structural achievement has been the consolidation of a durable, self-conscious Dalit identity: sustained mobilisation pressure has measurably improved Dalits’ social and economic position relative to a decade or more prior, even though their position within the class system remains structurally weak, since the wider economic system continues to be substantially monopolised by upper castes — meaning Dalit emancipation remains tightly bound up with freedom from continuing economic dependence, not simply with formal social recognition.

Present Situation: From Cultural Protest to Political Strategy

• The government’s policy of protective discrimination fundamentally reshaped the backward classes’ own strategic repertoire: where earlier generations had pursued census appeals, Sanskritisation, cultural revolt, or the construction of counter-cultures, the contemporary strategy is explicitly political — organising to secure formal recognition as Scheduled Castes or Other Backward Classes, extending reservation periods, and insisting on the faithful implementation of existing government policy.
• Following the implementation of the Mandal Commission’s recommendations in August 1990 and the subsequent establishment of state-level Minority Commissions, a large and growing number of castes have actively sought OBC recognition specifically to access reserved quota seats (historically 15% for SCs and 27% for OBCs) — a durable, institutionalised continuation of the same underlying quest for recognition and resource access that animated the movement’s earlier cultural and religious phases.

Contemporary Developments: Sub-Categorisation and the Creamy-Layer Debate

• The Supreme Court’s August 2024 judgment in the sub-classification case, delivered by a seven-judge bench with a 6–1 majority, held that states may constitutionally sub-classify Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes into separate groups for reservation purposes based on their relative degree of backwardness — overruling the Court’s own 2005 E.V. Chinnaiah precedent, which had held such sub-classification impermissible. States cannot reserve 100% of quota seats for any single sub-class, and any sub-classification must rest on empirical data demonstrating inadequate representation.
• Four of the seven judges went further, explicitly calling for identification and exclusion of a “creamy layer” within SC/ST categories — parallel to the existing OBC creamy-layer exclusion — so reservation benefits reach the most disadvantaged within these categories rather than being captured disproportionately by their already-better-off members; as of 2025, the Court has reiterated that implementing this recommendation is a matter for the legislature and executive rather than the judiciary itself, leaving the question formally unresolved. The debate directly continues the tension this article has traced throughout: between backward-class mobilisation as a claim to group recognition and resources, and the reality that any defined group inevitably contains its own internal hierarchy of relative advantage.