Analyze the term ‘dalit’ and the evolution of the related concept as a reflection of the changing consciousness and self-assertion of the dalit community. (2011)
Naming is an act of power: who names a group, and what the name asserts, measures its position. The terms applied to India’s ex-untouchable castes — Depressed Classes, Exterior Castes, Harijan, Scheduled Caste, Dalit, Dalit-Bahujan — are not synonyms but a record of the locus of definition migrating from outside the community to inside it.
Names conferred from outside
- Depressed Classes, in official use from the late nineteenth century, and Exterior Castes, proposed by John Henry Hutton for the 1931 Census, both fixed a people by their distance from the caste-Hindu centre — a position inside somebody else’s order.
- Harijan, “children of God”, was adopted by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in 1933. For Gandhi untouchability was a corruption of Hinduism curable by a change of heart. B. R. Ambedkar rejected the word: it conferred compassion rather than rights and left intact the religious sanction that he held produced untouchability.
The administrative category
Scheduled Caste entered the statute book through the Government of India Act, 1935 and the Government of India (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1936, and survives in Article 341. It converted stigma into entitlement, but it is a list, not a concept: a Scheduled Caste is whoever the President has notified. Identity is still conferred by the state, and the category says nothing about why the group is where it is.
‘Dalit’: the name taken, not given
From the Marathi and Sanskrit root meaning broken or ground down, the word was used by Jyotirao Phule and revived in the early 1970s by neo-Buddhist followers of Ambedkar. The shift is decisive: dalit names not a ritual rank but an act done to people. It is relational and accusatory, refusing at once the karma of pollution, the pity of Harijan and the neutrality of the schedule.
The Dalit Panthers (Bombay, 1972; Namdeo Dhasal, Raja Dhale) made it a programme. Their 1973 manifesto defined Dalits expansively — scheduled castes and tribes, neo-Buddhists, the working people, the landless and poor peasants, women, and all exploited politically, economically or in the name of religion. Caste and class were fused, and a stigma became a claim to speak for the oppressed as such.
Widening, and contesting, the concept
- Kancha Ilaiah (Why I Am Not a Hindu, 1996) stretched it to Dalitbahujan, claiming the productive Shudra majority and a separate non-Brahmanical civilisation rather than admission to Hinduism. Gail Omvedt (Dalits and the Democratic Revolution, 1994) read the whole arc as a democratic revolution.
- Gopal Guru warns that one name flattens difference, since Dalit women speak differently from the male leadership; Ghanshyam Shah holds there has never been a single unified Dalit movement.
- The word remains officially contested: in 2018 the Union information and broadcasting ministry advised broadcasters to avoid ‘Dalit’ for the constitutional ‘Scheduled Caste’, following a direction of the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court — an attempt to return naming power to the state, resisted by much of the community.
Conclusion
The evolution traces a movement from being described, to being scheduled, to describing oneself — pity displaced by entitlement, entitlement by assertion. That the word’s official standing is still litigated confirms the point: recognition is contested first in vocabulary.