What are the different forms of untouchability still practised in India? Discuss with suitable illustrations. (2024)
Article 17 abolished untouchability “in any form” in 1950, yet the practice has changed address rather than disappeared. B. R. Ambedkar insisted it is not the caste system’s excess but its foundation, since a pure pole requires an impure one; Louis Dumont drew the corollary in Homo Hierarchicus (1966) that it cannot be abolished piecemeal. The surviving forms are best read domain by domain.
Space, water and the dead
- Settlement. The cheri, wada or tola still sits at the village edge, downwind and downstream; in cities the same logic reappears as refusal of rental housing to Dalit tenants.
- Water. Denial of common wells, tanks and handpumps. The Mahad Satyagraha (1927) was fought over the Chavdar tank, ritually purified after Dalits drank from it; water access remains a recurring trigger of atrocity cases.
- Death. Separate cremation grounds, and refusal of passage to Dalit funeral processions through caste-Hindu streets — litigated repeatedly in Tamil Nadu.
The tumbler and the plate
- The two-tumbler system: separate glasses, seating and washing arrangements for Dalit customers in village tea shops.
- Segregated seating at school mid-day meals, and caste-Hindu parents withdrawing children when the cook appointed is a Dalit woman.
- Refusal of water or cooked food from Dalit hands, and exclusion from food-handling employment.
Service, temple and priest
- Barbers refusing haircuts and washermen refusing clothes, frequently as collective social boycott punishing an act of assertion.
- Denial of temple entry, of priestly service at life-cycle rites, and of a place in processions and chariot festivals.
Work marked as polluting
- Manual scavenging and hazardous sewer cleaning survive the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act (2013): at least 377 workers died cleaning sewers and septic tanks between 2019 and 2023 on figures placed before Parliament, and profiling under the NAMASTE scheme found the overwhelming majority of such workers to be from Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes.
- Carcass disposal, leatherwork and funeral drumming stay caste-assigned.
Enforcement, and the newer addresses
- Endogamy enforced by boycott, khap intervention and honour killing; Dalit grooms stopped from riding a horse in the wedding procession.
- In Sukanya Shantha v. Union of India (October 2024) the Supreme Court struck down prison-manual rules in several States that assigned sweeping and scavenging to “menial” castes and segregated barracks, holding them to be untouchability under Article 17.
- Campus and workplace exclusion conducted in the vocabulary of merit, and caste abuse online.
Conclusion
Untouchability has migrated — from the well to the rental market, from the temple gate to the interview panel — while its grammar of purity, distance and stigma is intact. Statute has ended its legality without ending its social sanction, and that gap, not a residue awaiting time, is the sociological problem.