Until the 1950s and 1960s, that is, until a generation or so after Independence (by which time the anti-discrimination legislation of India's new democratic, egalitarian Constitution was beginning to take effect), a system of caste was in place that manifested its inequalities (more patently in rural areas) largely in terms of commensality (eating together) and marriage. Writing about the village of Ramkheri in central India, A. Mayer observes that in 1954:
The chief way in which differences in rank were expressed was through commensality ... Commensal relations were expressed through the taking of food cooked in water or in oil [called kacca and pakka food, respectively], the taking of water from common receptacles, and the smoking together of cigarettes or pipes. A caste's eating of kacca or pakka food from the hearth or hands of another caste betokened that the former was either equal to or inferior to the latter. Conversely, a prohibition on commensal relations meant that a caste considered itself superior or simply separate.
(Mayer in Fuller 1996:33–4)
Marriage within received endogamous boundaries was the other main indicator. We have already had a glimpse, from comments made above, of how complex and rigid such practices could be. In fact, especially in the village context, endogamy has proved to be perhaps the most tenacious indicator of caste hierarchies. We shall return to this point in due course.
Let us now inquire into the practice of Untouchability as it developed in the modern period; we shall then go on to consider how caste is changing in contemporary times. We have already seen what the historical roots of congenital Untouchability seem to be, viz. certain pratiloma or illicit sexual unions, extra -varṇ origins not ratified as falling within the Vedic pale, and certain occupations or behavioural practices identified as polluting by the Law Codes, were reckoned to be the chief causes of Untouchable status. As ‘polluting’, this status, or rather its causal elements, could not be factored into what was envisaged by relevant Brahminic authority as a properly Vedic or dharmic way of life.
Those who are reckoned as ‘Untouchables’ today do not usually describe themselves in this way; in general they prefer the term dalit (= ‘oppressed’, ‘broken’), or sometimes harijan (= ‘children of Hari, viz. God’). The first term seems to have been given currency (if not actually been created) by Ambedkar, while the latter was promoted by Gandhi. Let us look at dalit first, but before we do so let me point out that I am not using ‘Untouchable’ in the following discussion with any intention to offend, of course;I employ it in the purely descriptive context of its regular use in official Indian documentation and early modern writings on the subject.
‘Dalit’ comes from the Sanskrit verb dal, dalati, which means to ‘split’, ‘break open’, ‘fragment’. In his book on Ambedkar, who was himself an Untouchable, Christophe Jaffrelot comments as follows:
Ambedkar's hypothesis [in his book The Untouchables: Who were they and why they became Untouchables? published in 1948] is remarkably complex. He explains that all primitive societies have been conquered at one time or another by invaders who set themselves above the autochthonous [native] peoples. In the process of social fragmentation that followed, peripheral groups, or what he calls ‘Broken Men’, split off from the centre ... When the conquerors became sedentary, they turned to these ‘Broken Men’ to protect them from the attacks of nomadic tribes. Ambedkar applied this theory by portraying Untouchables as the descendants of the Broken Men (or Dalit, in Marathi), and thus as the original, pre-Aryan, inhabitants of India.
(2005:40)
In this view, the dalits are not those who were ‘downtrodden’ or ‘oppressed’ by caste – possibly a race apart who were adjudged culturally inferior by those who came to dominate them. Rather, they were those original inhabitants of India who were hived or ‘split’ off by force of circumstances from the parent body. If they became ‘oppressed’ with all the modern implications of Untouchability, this was a historical consequence through no fault of their own;it was the result of overweening arrogance on the part of the leaders of their conquerors, viz. the Brahmins. Notwithstanding this dubious theory of dalit-origin by an early user of the term, dalit is used today as the preferred modern equivalent of ‘Untouchable’.4
In general, Hindu dalit communities take recourse to a variety of origin-myths to account for their Untouchable status. In her fine work on a dalit caste, the Vālmīkis, in their Indian and UK contexts, Julia Leslie has encapsulated the structure of these myths as follows: in older versions of the myth, first – ‘in the beginning’ – before caste distinctions existed, one among a family of two or more brothers is asked to remove a source of pollution (often a dead cow). This request is usually made by the elder brother; in more modern versions, as in the case of Ambedkar's theory, ‘there existed one harmonious community, the Adi or original inhabitants of India’. Then, (older version) God or some other authority understands, mistakenly, that the younger brother is a ‘Brahmin’ and the older brother, who has done nothing wrong, is an ‘Untouchable’; in the newer versions, ‘Aryans’, either foreigners who invade from outside India or members of the Adi or ‘original’ community who had left and then returned to India, lord it over the indigenous Adis and class them as ‘Untouchables’, this inferiority now being ‘enshrined in a self-justifying but false “Aryan” mythology: traditional Hindu dharma’ (2003:43–58). Note that, in both cases, the old and the new versions, the Untouchables are innocent victims of an aggressive class of usurpers of political power who impose a self-serving, divisive and falsely justified socio-religious hierarchy incorporating the population as a whole.
The traditional Sanskrit texts have many terms to denote Untouchability.
The word aspṛśya [‘untouchable’] refers both to temporary states of pollution (such as menstruation, death and childbirth) and to the permanent untouchability of low-caste status ... The term avarṇa (literally, ‘without varṇa or ‘one for whom there is no varṇa’) denotes a person deemed permanently ‘untouchable’: such a person is pegged even below the śīdra in the classical Hindu hierarchy.
(Leslie 2003:28)
But as Leslie goes on to point out, there are many other terms, such as terms that exclude from social and sexual intercourse: ‘abhojyānna (“one whose food should not be eaten”), adṛśya (“one who should not be looked at”), agamya (“one who should not be approached for sex”), apapātra (“one with whom one should not exchange food vessels”) ... asaṃbhāṣya (“one with whom conversation should be avoided”) ... and bāhya (“one who is segregated”, that is, one who lives outside the village boundary)’ (ibid.:30), and terms or names that indicated the bottom positions in the hierarchy (e.g. antyaja, antyāvaśāyin, pañcama), or polluting or despised occupations or origins, e.g. tribal groups such as the niṣāda, caṇḍāla, śvapaca. Here we have some indication of the range of exclusion, at least theoretically, that constituted Untouchability.
By the later stages of the nineteenth century, the practice was entrenched across the land. Here is a description of what this could mean in the context of a community of Mahārs, a caste (jāti) of Untouchables, in western-central India at the time. Jaffrelot quotes the author of a memoir recording the humiliation of collecting bhakri or food-leftovers.
Payment for ... daily work carried out by the entire family consisted of going to beg for bhakri. [The Mahār head of the family] had little spherical bells hanging on to a stick, so that villagers could move away as soon as they heard the Mahār coming to beg. The Mahār who went to beg puffed out his chest on leaving the maharvada,5 twirled his moustache and walked ostentatiously, clearing his throat, like a man ... But once he entered the village, his posture shrank, he bent his spinal column in the manner of a hunchback and crawled like a snail. On reaching a dwelling, without opening his mouth, he rang the bells on his stick three times. Then some scraps of rancid and stale food were thrown into his blanket. The blanket was more than half full after he completed his rounds of the village. The Mahār loaded the bhakri on to his sh
oulders and returned home delighted.
(2005:21)
It was in this climate of ingrained discrimination that Bhimrao Ambedkar – ‘Babasaheb’ to his followers – was born into the Mahār Untouchable caste in 1891 in the town of Mhow, in the modern-day state of Madhya Pradesh (though his family had come from Maharashtra). The Mahārs were not on the lowest scale of Untouchability, but traditionally they did ‘menial tasks like cutting firewood, digging graves and disposing of dead animals, especially cattle which they ate ... Mahārs were also traditionally employed as messengers, and this also had polluting connotations insofar as it involved the announcements of deaths. Mahārs also had an ancient semiofficial function of arbitrating in boundary disputes and mending the village well’ (T. Fitzgerald in Harris 1999:82). This function of arbitration gave the Mahārs a sense of pride and had positive aspirational implications. But they could also be small landholders and farmers, and, during British rule, were recruited into the army.
The young Ambedkar was born into a family that had a strong association with the British army. His father, Ramji Sakpal, ‘was pious, reciting Hindu epics to his children and chanting songs of saints such as Tukaram every evening. He imbued his family with a spiritual message with a strong social content, not least because he was a devotee of Kabir, one of the bhakti saints who fiercely denounced caste hierarchy’ (Jaffrelot 2005:26–7). Both Kabīr (fifteenth century) and Tukäräm (seventeenth century) are reckoned to be promulgators of Sant-Mat which decried caste discrimination, so this tradition exerted an influence on Ambedkar from his early years. He was highly intelligent, a quality which eventually earned him the patronage of the Mahāraja of Baroda (who came from a tradition not sympathetic to Brahmin elitism). Ambedkar went to College in Bombay, and then studied economics abroad, in New York and London. ‘Ambedkar registered at the Bombay Bar in 1923 and began legal practice at the High Court the following year’ (Jaffrelot 2005:29). This expertise was to stand him in good stead in later life. In 1927, he obtained a PhD from Columbia University in New York. ‘He thus became the first Untouchable to obtain a doctorate’ (Jaffrelot: ibid.). Personal experience of caste-discrimination as an Untouchable, exposure to the social values of Sant-Mat from an early age, and his studies abroad, gave him a strong belief in democratic principles and the rule of law; combined with his legal practice, this equipped Ambedkar for his mission to alleviate the condition of his fellow Untouchables. There was an additional factor that set the scene. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the region had experienced anti-Brahmin sentiment in view of the fact that Brahmins had penetrated, in a way that was disproportionate but advantageous to their small numbers, the Indian bureaucracy run by the British. Here the Brahmin/non-Brahmin divide was consequential; it engendered a resentment against Brahmins that Ambedkar could use to his advantage.
Ambedkar believed that caste and caste-inequality were integral to Hinduism. Thus for him, in respect of caste, Hinduism could not be reformed. Caste needed to be extirpated if an egalitarian society in India was to be realized. If this destroyed Hinduism as a system, then so be it. In 1927, during an agitation led by Ambedkar in the town of Mahad in Maharashtra over the right of Untouchables to use a water tank there, two resolutions were passed that ‘asked, first, for the eradication of internal divisions within Hindu society so that eventually it would consist of only one category of people, and, second, for the priestly profession to be opened to all. Finally, several speakers attacked the Laws of Manu, a copy of which was placed on a stake set up for the occasion in front of the stand, and solemnly burnt by a Dalit ascetic’ (Jaffrelot 2005:48).
Throughout his active career as an opponent of caste, Ambedkar was ambivalent as to whether Untouchables were to be regarded as Hindus or not. He never succeeded in clarifying his position on this issue. It seems in fact that he ended up admitting grudgingly that they were generally regarded as Hindus, even among Untouchables themselves.6 After many trials and reverses, Ambedkar was appointed in August 1947 as Minister of Law in Prime Minister Nehru's first Government of independent India and given the task of chairing the committee that was to draft the Indian Constitution, which he successfully discharged. Thus he played a significant part in bequeathing a Constitution to India that enshrined egalitarian and democraticprinciples. A few weeks before he died in December 1956, he converted to Buddhism, a faith he regarded as reflecting his egalitarian values, and thousands of Untouchables, mostly from his own caste, who were present on the occasion, followed his example.7
Mass conversion among Untouchables to Islam and Christianity has also occurred. Many have converted in the hope of experiencing a less disadvantaged way of life (though conversion to the Abrahamic faiths, unlike in the case of Buddhism, does not make one eligible per se to receive the benefit of Government affirmative action). Such conversions have alarmed the more jingoistic Hindu factions, some of which have argued in a number of States – successfully, on occasion – for what may be regarded as tendentious legislation against religious conversion of vulnerable groups. Others among these factions have sought to implement ‘Shuddhi’ movements to win Untouchables back to the Hindu fold. Shuddhi here means ‘purification’. The idea is that converts can re-join the Hindu community after undergoing simple ritual ‘cleansing’. To make the re-conversion more palatable, these factions profess to be in favour of removing at least the more outstanding of the traditional discriminatory excesses of caste. Requiring purification, on the one hand, and offering concessions, on the other, is a strange way of seeking remedial action, and these initiatives have not in general been successful.
As indicated earlier, the Indian Constitution outlaws Untouchability.
The original historic resolution, passed prior to independence in 1932 and ratified by the Indian Government in 1950, declares ... that, henceforth, amongst Hindus no one shall be regarded as an untouchable by reason of his birth and those who have been so regarded hitherto will have the same right as other Hindus in regard to the use of public wells, public schools, public roads and all other public institutions.
In 1955, Article 17 of the Abolition of Untouchability in the Untouchability (Offences) Act XXII replaced all earlier provisions, and applied across the whole of India.
(Leslie 2003:25)
We note the use of the word ‘untouchable’ in the official documentation; other expressions for this status in the Indian Constitution are ‘Scheduled Caste’ and ‘Scheduled Tribe’ (often abbreviated in the literature as SC and ST; the distinction between the two categories remains imprecise and unclear). Still, legislation does not mean that the practice of Untouchability has been abolished in the everyday life of the nation. Far from it. Recent estimates calculate that in a population of over one billion, about 150 million people belong to the so-called Untouchable castes. At one extreme, one still comes across reports in the Indian newspapers of people of low or Untouchable status being attacked or even killed, or having their homes burnt, mainly in rural areas, by higher-caste assailants for using wells or other amenities that have traditionally been the preserve of the latter. And instances of caste discrimination extending to ‘Untouchability’ at less extreme levels in daily life, again mainly but by no means exclusively in rural areas, are innumerable. So what does the practice of ‘Untouchabilty’ really imply? Ambedkar himself recounts how,
as a child, he wondered why no barber would cut his hair. Above all, he suffered a life-defining humiliation that he was never to forget. One day he set off by train with his brother and sister to meet his father at his place of work. On reaching their destination, the three children were questioned by the stationmaster who, learning their caste, ‘took five steps back’. As for the tonga (a horse-drawn cart) drivers, none of them would take them to their father's village. One of them agreed, provided that they drove the cart themselves. Later the tongawala stopped for a snack in a dhaba (travellers’ inn), whereas the children had to stay outside and were reduced to drinking muddy water from a stream.
(Jaffrelot 2005:3)
It is perhaps a comment on social progress in the light of the Indian Constitution and an increasingly aggressive capitalist economy in which money is beginning to confer rank, that such an accumulation of negative reactions to Untouchable status is becoming more and more rare, even in rural contexts, where change might be expected to be less welcome; yet one would not be surprised to find individual elements of such a reaction apparent even today. The truth is that expressions of what counts for Untouchability vary from place to place and even from community to community. Many Untouchable groups have inherited caste names that denote occupations or exclusion of one kind or other. ‘“Untouchable” jātis today include the “Chamars” (camār) [‘leather-workers’], the “Chuhras” (cuhḍā) [‘sweeper’, ‘scavenger’] and “Bhangis” (bhagī ) [also denoting ‘sweeper’] of north India, the Mahārs (Mahār) of central India, the Paaiyars [‘outcastes’] of Tamilnadu, the Pullayas of Kerala’ (Leslie 2003:32–3). These designations are being replaced for obvious reasons, by their traditional bearers, by dalit or other positive appellations which have been drawn from religious or other contexts. Leslie points out that in some areas Caṇḍālas call themselves ‘Nāmaśīdras’ or ‘Śūdras who worship the Divine Name’, Julahas opt for ‘Kabṇrpanthī’, viz. followers of Kabīr's path, and so on. She quotes the researcher R. Deliège to the effect that ‘at each census-taking, hundreds of castes change their name in this way, hoping to gain in status’ (see Leslie 2003:33), or as Leslie prefers to say, ‘hoping to disassociate themselves from the identities constructed for them by others’ (ibid.).
Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (The Library of Religious Beliefs and Practices) Page 25