What do you understand by social movement? How has the mobilization by Scheduled Castes helped them in constructing a new identity? (2014)
A social movement is sustained collective mobilisation, carried by an ideology and directed at change. The second half of the question turns on Alberto Melucci’s insight that a movement’s deepest work is not winning demands but constructing a collective “we”. Scheduled Caste mobilisation is the clearest Indian illustration of that claim.
What a social movement is
- M. S. A. Rao (Social Movements in India, 1978) defines it as sustained collective action based on an ideology and aimed at changing some part of the social order, and classifies movements as reformist, transformative and revolutionary by the depth of change sought.
- Herbert Blumer called movements collective enterprises to establish a new order of life; Mario Diani (1992) defines them as networks of informal interaction in political or cultural conflict on the basis of a shared collective identity.
- The necessary elements are a collective base, an ideology, some organisation, continuity and an orientation to change. A riot has the collectivity without the continuity, and so is not a movement.
How mobilisation built a new identity
Manuel Castells (The Power of Identity, 1997) distinguishes a resistance identity, built defensively out of the material of stigma, from a project identity that redefines a group’s position in society. Scheduled Caste mobilisation performed that conversion through six mechanisms.
- Naming. “Untouchable”, “Depressed Classes” and M. K. Gandhi’s “Harijan” were names given by others, and all were rejected. Dalit, meaning broken or crushed, was used by Jyotirao Phule and revived by the Dalit Panthers (Bombay, 1972; Namdeo Dhasal, J. V. Pawar, Raja Dhale), who widened it to all the oppressed. Self-naming is the first political act.
- Counter-history. Phule’s Gulamgiri (1873) rewrote caste as conquest; B. R. Ambedkar’s Who Were the Shudras? (1946) and The Untouchables (1948) gave untouchability a historical, not a karmic, origin. Bhima Koregaon (1818) became a memory of valour.
- Religious exit. Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism at Nagpur on 14 October 1956 denied the Hindu order the authority to define him. He rejected the Sanskritisation route M. N. Srinivas described, since imitation concedes the hierarchy.
- Literature and the right to speak. Dalit sahitya, from Daya Pawar’s Baluta (1978) to Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan (1997) and Bama’s Karukku (1992), made autobiography evidence. Gopal Guru held that lived experience confers the authority to theorise, turning humiliation into standpoint.
- Symbols and public space. The blue flag, the statue, “Jai Bhim” and the Constitution read as a text of emancipation.
- Aggregation into Bahujan. Kanshi Ram’s employees’ federation (1971) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (1984) fused scattered jatis into a majority category. Sudha Pai shows dignity becoming a political currency.
The identity is real but contested
- Jati remains the lived unit, which is why State of Punjab v. Davinder Singh (2024) permitted sub-classification within the Scheduled Castes.
- Sharmila Rege’s Dalit feminist standpoint and Uma Chakravarti’s brahmanical patriarchy show the “Dalit” subject to have been implicitly male.
- Dalit Christians and Muslims remain outside the list, a boundary the Justice K. G. Balakrishnan Commission (2022) has yet to settle.
Conclusion
Mobilisation produced a collective actor where the caste order had left only a category of the excluded — a project identity in Castells’s sense. Its test now is whether a name won can be converted into land, capital and equal citizenship.