What are the various forms of untouchability in India? Critically examine. (2021)
Untouchability is exclusion attached to birth and justified by pollution. Article 17, the Protection of Civil Rights Act (1955) and the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act (1989) have abolished it in law; the sociological question is what survives, in what form, and whether the inherited category still describes it.
The forms, in outline
- Spatial: segregated hamlets and separate cremation grounds; in cities, refusal of rental housing.
- Commensal: two-tumbler service in tea shops, separate utensils, segregated mid-day-meal seating.
- Religious and service: denial of temple entry and priestly service; barbers and washermen withholding service under social boycott.
- Occupational: manual scavenging, sewer cleaning, carcass disposal and leatherwork.
- Matrimonial and punitive: endogamy enforced by boycott, khap intervention and honour killing.
- Institutional and covert: discrimination on campuses and in private employment argued in the language of merit, and caste abuse online.
Why the forms regenerate
For Louis Dumont the impure pole is structurally necessary to the pure, so piecemeal prohibition merely relocates the practice. Marxist scholarship reads it instead as the idiom of an arrangement securing cheap and unfree labour, while Gerald D. Berreman‘s fieldwork showed that from below the order rests on coercion rather than consensus.
The critical questions
- Is the category still adequate? Dipankar Gupta (Interrogating Caste, 2000) argues that difference, not hierarchy, now organises caste, so much exclusion is horizontal rivalry rather than pollution. Gopal Guru proposes humiliation as the sharper concept, and Satish Deshpande notes that caste registers publicly only as the disability of the marginal, upper-caste caste-ness remaining invisible.
- Measurement. Amit Thorat and Omkar Joshi, using the India Human Development Survey of 2011–12, found 27% of households admitting the practice, rising to 52% among Brahmin households and running higher in rural areas and the central plains. Self-reporting of an illegal, stigmatised act yields a floor, not a level, and a question about kitchens and utensils captures commensality while missing housing, campuses and labour markets.
- Law against practice. The National Crime Records Bureau recorded 57,789 cases of crimes against Scheduled Castes in 2023, yet conviction rates remain low and registration is often resisted — so crime data measure policing as much as prevalence.
- Internal hierarchy. “Dalit” hides graded inequality, including untouchability practised between Scheduled Castes; the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling permitting States to sub-classify Scheduled Castes on quantifiable evidence concedes the point.
Conclusion
The category survives the critique but must be reformulated: not a ritual prohibition on touch, but a regionally uneven, internally graded regime of stigma that has moved from the well into housing, classrooms and hiring. Naming those newer forms is now the harder empirical task.