Write short note: Ritual purity and pollution in Hindu Society (1991)
Ritual purity (shuddhi) and pollution (ashuddhi) form the idiom in which Hindu society has traditionally expressed rank, distance and obligation. Louis Dumont made the opposition the generative principle of caste in Homo Hierarchicus (1966), but as an institution it is wider than caste ranking alone.
Two kinds of pollution
- Permanent and collective — attached at birth to a jati through the substances its hereditary occupation handles: death, human waste, hides, hair, the corpse. Priestly and scribal work is clean, scavenging and leatherwork irredeemably unclean.
- Temporary and individual — contracted by everyone through birth, death and menstruation, and removed by bathing, fasting and prescribed rites. P. V. Kane‘s History of Dharmashastra notes that a man’s nearest kin become untouchable to him for a fixed period after a death, and Hindus themselves identify this state with the condition of the untouchable castes.
How the idiom organises social life
- Varna and jati: the fourfold varna scheme ranks twice-born over Shudra, and places the untouchable outside it altogether; thousands of local jatis are ranked by the same logic.
- Commensality: elaborate rules on who may give and take kaccha and pakka food, water, and the pipe, and in what vessel — McKim Marriott in Kishan Garhi and Adrian Mayer in Ramkheri read local rank directly off these transactions.
- Endogamy: marriage within the jati guards its ritual substance; hypergamy is tolerated, the reverse union is not.
- Occupational pollution: barbers, washermen, drummers, midwives, leatherworkers and scavengers are stigmatised by what they touch on others’ behalf.
- Spatial and religious exclusion: the separate hamlet downstream of the village, separate wells and cremation grounds, denial of temple entry — and B. R. Ambedkar‘s Mahad satyagraha of 1927, after which the tank was ritually purified.
Persistence and critique
Article 17 ended the idiom’s legal standing, not its social life. Its hardest residue is sanitation work: government figures placed 622 deaths in sewers and septic tanks between 2017 and early 2026, and the NAMASTE programme begun in 2023-24 had validated about 89,000 such workers by end-2025 — an occupation still drawn almost wholly from the formerly untouchable castes.
The idiom must not be mistaken for consensus: Gerald Berreman found that those it ranks lowest do not share it, and Dipankar Gupta shows that competing jati myths yield incompatible purity scales rather than one.
Conclusion
Ritual purity and pollution supply Hindu society with its vocabulary of hierarchy, and that vocabulary has outlived its legal sanction by migrating into the division of labour itself. Its analytical value lies in showing how an idea of contamination converts an arrangement of degrading work into a sacred order of rank.