India’s Dalits: Racism and Contemporary Change

Eleanor Zelliot is Laird Bell Professor of History, Emerita, at Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota. She has written widely on India’s Untouchables and on the movement led by Dr B. R. Ambedkar.

The term Dalit (from the Sanskrit for “ground down”, “suppressed”) is the current usage for India’s oppressed, primarily ex-Untouchables. The “ex” refers to the fact that the Indian Constitution makes the practice of untouchability a legal offence. In spite of much progress over the last sixty years, Dalits are still at the social and economic bottom of society. The figures in one study of the Dalits’ lot, Untouchability in Rural India, tell the story:

 

The official statistics for the decade 1990–2000 indicate that a total of 285,871 cases of various crimes against Dalits were registered ... under the Anti-Untouchability Act [or] the Prevention of Atrocities Act. These include 553 cases of murder, 2,990 cases of grievous hurt, 919 rapes, 184 kidnappings/abductions, 127 robberies, 456 cases of arson, 1,403 cases of caste discrimination and 8,179 cases of atrocities ... These official figures only capture the tip of the iceberg.¹

 

As the study’s title suggests, violence against Dalits is most often found in the villages. There are slights and humiliations and at times restrictions in housing and jobs in the cities of India, but Dalits are not identifiable by sight; anonymity, impossible in villages, affords some protection in urban settings. There is also now a large group of middle-class Dalits and a thriving Dalit intellectual and literary sector. However, most of the work traditionally considered polluting in India is done by Dalits: the cleaning of toilets, work with leather, bringing fuel to the burning (cremation) grounds, disposing of animal carcasses; in some areas but not in others, laundry and fishing. The basic occupation of Dalits is landless labour.

 

Two questions relate the situation of Dalits to the theme of race and racism: are Dalits considered by higher castes to be an inferior race? Do Dalits think of themselves as a race? We should note that the Indian languages have no general word for “race” as it is used in the West. The determining factors in the hierarchy of castes are purity and pollution, and the Untouchable is the most polluting, i.e., not to be touched. The prime minister of India, Manmohan Singh, told the Dalit-Minority International Conference in Delhi in 2006 that “the only parallel to the practice of ‘untouchability’ is apartheid in South Africa”. It is fairly clear that the isolation of Dalits and the violence against them can be compared to race prejudice, but they have a different basis and perhaps a different solution.

 

The question of identity as a race must be answered equivocally. From time to time, movements to declare an identity for Dalits of “original inhabitant” of India or past “lords of the earth” have arisen. Currently, there is a Mulnivasi (“original” or “first inhabitant”) movement among some young intellectuals, generally from the south, and a Sakya movement which declares identity with the Buddha’s non-Aryan tribe. Most Buddhists, however, reach out to Buddhists internationally without racial identity.

Creation of Untouchable Castes

Other than Dalit, terms which indicate the history of Untouchables include “Scheduled Castes” and “Scheduled Tribes” (referring to the schedules or lists established by the British government in 1935 of groups who were to receive special benefits—a form of “affirmative action”). Dalits include Scheduled Castes and Tribes, those now termed Vimukt (tribes freed from the appellation of “criminal” attached to them by the British), and the nomadic tribes. Gandhi’s term Harijan (people of God), used first in the 1930s, now is used primarily by Gandhians and some Scheduled Castes such as the Bhangis (now Valmikis), to whom Gandhi was chiefly referring. Dalit was first used as a Marathi translation of the British census term “depressed classes”. In the early 1970s, it was taken up by a youthful group of Untouchable activists in Bombay who called themselves “Dalit Panthers” in a direct tribute to the American Black Panthers. Like the word “black”, it was a bold, defiant term. The Dalit Panther movement gave birth to Dalit literature, a phenomenon very important to Marathi literature and now spread to most language groups in India. Dalit has now generally replaced Harijan in scholarly studies and the English press.

 

Two terms, now little used, indicate the relationship of Dalits to the classic division of Indian society into four varnas or categories: panchama, or the fifth group beyond the four varnas, and avarna (without varna). The tenth chapter of the tenth book of the Rig Veda (ca. 1500–1000 bce), the foundational Brahmanical Hindu text, introduces the varnas, or the four main social classes into which Hindu society was traditionally divided: the original man was sacrificed so that his head became the Brahmans (priests and advisers); his arms became the Kshatriyas (kings and warriors); his thighs became the Vaishya (merchants and landowners); and his feet became the Shudra (servants of all, artisans, labourers). These are the four varnas. Varna literally means “colour” but colour does not determine caste. The Rig Veda also mentions Dasa—“servants” or “enemies”. No specific castes are mentioned in the Rig Veda and the idea of polluting untouchability does not emerge until later texts. The first three varnas were called arya (pure) and qualified to be “twice-born”. Nineteenth-century British scholars and some Indian scholars interpreted this as race: native-born Indians versus a European-related group of invaders. Modern scholarship generally interprets arya as an Indo-European language group, unrelated to race.

 

Later texts (ca. 300 bce–500 ce) introduced the idea of the chandala, designating people fulfilling such occupations as fisherman, burning-ground attendant or leather-worker, who should live outside the village so as not to contaminate others. The laws of Manu, the Manusmriti, further developed the idea of purity and pollution. According to it, the chandala group originates from three types: the offspring of a Shudra father and a Brahman mother; a Brahman who begs from a Shudra in order to perform a sacrifice; one who has killed a Brahman. No racial basis is indicated, nor any polluting contact with leather. Some texts use the word asprishya (untouchable) for certain low castes and menstruating women. By the fifth century ce, untouchable castes have developed. Chinese travellers mention butchers, fishermen, public performers, executioners and scavengers as groups obliged to live outside the city. It is a curious list, seemingly arbitrary, and may not totally reflect historical reality; but it does indicate that occupation rather than descent may have determined untouchability until more modern times.

 

The English word “caste”, derived from the Portuguese casta or “pure”, should be understood as covering two Sanskrit terms: varna, described above, and jati, meaning a group which is endogamous, speaking one language, living in one area of India and with accepted traditions and customs. A jati can usually be placed within a varna. Jati rather than varna is the most important category today, except for the general categories of Brahman and Untouchable.

Change in the Modern Period

In the nineteenth century, the important caste reformer, Jotirao (or Jotiba) Phule (1827–90), and the most articulate reformer from the Mahar caste, Gopal Baba Walangkar (1840–1900), posited racial theories to explain Untouchable degradation. Phule was from the Mali market-gardening caste. Highly educated, he founded several schools for Untouchables and girls, and also a socio-religious organisation, the Satyashodak Samaj (Truth-Seeking Society). Phule “depicted Brahmans as the descendants of Aryan invaders, who had conquered the indigenous people of India. The Brahmans had usurped the inhabitants’ rightful power and property, and had imposed their religion”.²

 

Walangkar, an ex-army man, held not only that Untouchables were the original inhabitants of India, but that high-caste people from the south were “Australian–Semitic non-Aryans” and African negroes, that Chitipavan Brahmans were “Barbary Jews”, and that the high-caste Marathas’ forebears were “Turks”.³ A petition Walangkar sponsored to restore recruitment of Untouchables in the army after the British stopped such recruitment in favour of northern ‘‘martial races” was circulated in the name of the Anarya Doshparihar Mandali (Non-Aryan Group for the Removal of Wrongs). Phule and Walangkar both wrote in a period when the idea that India had experienced an Aryan invasion in ancient times was current in international scholarship. More modern views hold that there was a slow movement of an Indo-European language group into the subcontinent, and other reformers did not see caste as having racial origins.

 

In the twentieth century, there was a limited revival of the race theory of caste. Ad and Adi movements arose in the Punjab as Ad Dharm (original religion) and in the south as Adi Andhra and Adi Dravidian (first or original people of Andhra; first or original Dravidians). Their period of strength was in the decades before Independence in 1947; in the south, the movement was under the shelter of the Dravidian movement, a strong non-Brahman social and political movement still extant today. In recent years, there has been a revival of the “original inhabitant” theory in a few young and small organisations such as the aforementioned Mulnivasi (original inhabitant) and Sakya (the non-Aryan tribe of the Buddha) movements.

B. R. Ambedkar

In the 1920s, one individual began to dominate the movement of Untouchables in the western state of Maharashtra and to some extent all over India. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) was the fourteenth child of a Mahar army schoolteacher, born in the town of Mhow in Madhya Pradesh in central India. The family moved several times, finally to Bombay, so that Ambedkar could have a high-school education. With the encouragement of several reformers, including the reformist non-Brahman rulers of Baroda and Kolhapur, he secured a high-school and Elphinston College education in Bombay, and then in most unusual circumstances he earned an MA and PhD from Columbia University in New York and a DSc from London University. He was also called to the Bar (qualified as a barrister) at Gray’s Inn in London. He returned to India permanently in 1923 to devote his life to inspiring Untouchables to claim their rights.

 

Ambedkar was at Columbia from 1913 to 1916 and harboured a life-long devotion to his professors, particularly the philosopher John Dewey. His belief in the power of education owes much to Dewey. It is also possible that Columbia aided in his formulation of the vision of an India not built on racism. The university borders on Harlem, the vast African-American locality in Manhattan. Ambedkar may have seen first hand the pernicious effects of racial division. In 1946, he wrote to W. E. B. Du Bois, the prominent African-American scholar:

 

There is so much similarity between the position of the Untouchables in India and of the position of Negroes in America that the study of the latter is not only natural but necessary. I was very much interested to read that the Negroes of America have filed a petition to the U.N.O. [United Nations Organisation]. The Untouchables of India are also thinking of following suit.⁴

 

Du Bois answered Ambedkar and acknowledged that he knew of his work, but there is little evidence of further direct contact between Ambedkar and African Americans. However, there were cultural influences between African Americans and Dalits. Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man was read by many. LeRoi Jones’s drama Slave was performed in Hindi by a Dalit literary group in 1994. And, as mentioned earlier, the “Dalit Panthers” as a militant guardian organisation were inspired by the “Black Panthers” in the United States.

 

Much of Ambedkar’s hitherto unpublished writing comparing the situation of Untouchables to that of American slaves and the Jewish ghetto appeared in 1979, and in almost all respects the Untouchables are regarded as the most deprived. But Ambedkar sees no racial basis to the discrimination against them.⁵ In contrast to Ambedkar, another hero of the Dalit community, “Periyar” E. V. Ramasami (1879–1973), worked on a separatist movement that was anti-Hindi, anti-Brahman, and anti-Aryan. It campaigned for a Dravidian separate state, self-respect, male–female equality and atheism. Not a Dalit himself, Periyar is one of six or seven leaders always held up for honour by Dalits. The demand for a separate Dravidian state was dropped in 1962.

 

The fact that Ambedkar did not believe in a racial theory of caste is clear in his first article on caste, written for a class at Columbia University in 1916. It makes the following points:

 

1. In spite of the composite make-up of the Hindu population, there is a deep cultural unity.

 

2. Caste is a parcelling into bits of a larger cultural unity.

 

3. Initially, there was only one caste in India.

 

4. Classes have become castes through imitation and excommunication.⁶

 

Ambedkar also founded in turn three political parties, none of which is now powerful except at a local level. He was, however, the inspiration for a currently powerful party, the BSP, the Bahujan (majority) Samaj Party, founded in 1984 chiefly to represent the traditionally lower castes of Indian society. The BSP’s founder, Kanshi Ram, who died in 2006, and his right-hand woman, Mayavati, who rose to be chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, began with an anti-elite, i.e., anti-Brahman stance. Recently, though, Mayavati has reached out to Brahmans for votes and service in her administration. The BSP acknowledges finding inspiration in Ambedkar’s ideas. Mayavati is the first Dalit woman to be chief minister of any Indian state.

 

Ambedkar attempted in several books to explain the caste system in non-racial terms. One volume concentrated on Shudras, the lowest varna of the fourfold division of the Hindu caste system. He argued that they were originally an Aryan group of the Kshatriya varna, losing their place in a Shudra king’s war with Brahmans. Ultimately, however, Ambedkar opposed all forms of caste. Hinduism itself, incapable of meaningful reform, must be rejected. In 1936, Ambedkar told a large group of Dalits near Nasik, where a five-year attempt to enter a Hindu temple ended in failure and violence, that he “would not die a Hindu”. Between this declaration and his mass conversion to Buddhism of hundreds of thousands of Dalits in 1956, Ambedkar published his most meaningful study of the origin of Untouchable castes. In The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables? (1948) Ambedkar proclaimed the theory that the Untouchables had been Buddhists, pushed out of the village and subjected to discrimination under the dominance of Hinduism in the Gupta period (fourth to sixth centuries ce), and through the centuries just before the Muslim invasions of the twelfth century.

 

Years of political and social activity followed the 1936 announcement, however, and Ambedkar founded a college, served as minister of labour under the British and as law minister under the first free Indian government. He also chaired the all-important Constituent Assembly’s committee on the Constitution. His legal mind and dedication to human rights are best seen in the Constituent Assembly’s debates on the Constitution (see vol. 13 of Ambedkar’s Writings and Speeches, ed. Vasant Moon). The Constitution also reinforced and extended the idea of “compensatory discrimination”, which included representation for members of Scheduled Castes and Tribes not only in elected bodies but also in government jobs and government-aided universities. The US policy of “affirmative action” has the same goal of equality but rejects the quota system which is part of the Indian commitment. The US system is based on race; the Indian system relies on the definitions of untouchability formulated in 1935, delineating four hundred jatis as “Scheduled Castes”, castes on a schedule or list. The tests for such classification involved the ability to enter temples, use the main village water source, be served at local tea shops, etc.

Mass Conversion to Buddhism

On 14 October 1956, on the 2,500th anniversary of the Buddha’s birth, Ambedkar led some five hundred thousand Untouchables out of Hinduism into Buddhism. The ceremony took place in Nagpur, and was presided over by the oldest Buddhist monk in India. It had come twenty years after Ambedkar’s declaration that he would not die a Hindu, but in spite of other duties, he had spent much time in preparation. He had visited Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Burma (Myanmar) to see how practice there fitted in with his ideal Buddhism. In 1954, he brought a Thai image of the Buddha to the Dehu Road cantonment of Mahars near the western city of Pune; they had invited him to preside over a new temple to their saint–poet, Chokhamela. This small building became the first temple/vihara of the new Buddhist movement. He completed his magnum opus, The Buddha and His Dhamma, a compilation of many Buddhist sources concentrated on the Buddha himself, with the teaching symbol of the Buddha on every page. Some doctrines widely practised by Buddhists were rejected. For suffering Untouchables, the idea that karma from a previous life determined their place in society was unthinkable, and indeed most Untouchables do not believe that sin in a previous life caused their untouchability. Much of the mythology in some traditional Buddhist sources was omitted, and Ambedkar’s Buddhism stressed humanism, compassion and rationality.

 

Conversion has continued, recently involving previously unreached groups. In 2007, tens of thousands of nomadic tribespeople and “Backward Tribes” gathered at the Bombay racetrack for a conversion ceremony. It was organised after years of preparation by Lakshman Mane, who had won fame with his autobiography Upra (Outsider), telling of his nomadic tribal life. Buddhist monks from India and abroad officiated. In 2010, Ravidasis, followers of the fourteenth-century Dalit guru Ravidas, gathered at the Kalachakra ground at Bodh Gaya for conversion to Buddhism, which they had come to regard as their original faith.

 

Ambedkar Buddhism has continued to enlarge its international connections, forming ties with Buddhists in Japan, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Britain, the United States, and elsewhere. The international aspect of Ambedkar Buddhism indicates its universalist outlook and non-racial ideology. Some take the Buddha’s tribe to be pre- or anti-Aryan but this is not a real issue for most Buddhists. The self-confidence and self-respect of those Dalits who feel a part of international Buddhism are consequences of this decades-long aspect of Ambedkar Buddhism.

Seeking International Recognition

Beginning in the 1990s, there was an increased interest in the international aspect of human rights. In acknowledgement of this, John C. B. Webster began to edit the Dalit International Newsletter in February 1996, which ran for ten years. Based in Waterford, Connecticut, the newsletter was widely distributed in the United States, Europe and India and reported news and opinions from around the world.

 

The first World Dalit Convention was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 1998. A thousand delegates heard Kanshi Ram pay homage to Ambedkar and Periyar. K. N. Narayanan, the Dalit president of India, received a prize. The convention urged the United Nations to appoint a special rapporteur to investigate human-rights violations, especially in India. It also urged the Indian authorities to investigate violence against Dalits, to maintain justice and to fill up the reservation quotas for government jobs and university places. An International Conference on Dalit Human Rights, which unified the Dalits of Britain, was held in London two years later. The conference brought together the Shri Guru Ravidas Sabha, the Bhagwan Valmiki Welfare Trust, and various Ambedkarite organisations. Ravidasi, denoting a follower of the Dalit guru Ravidas, is the preferred name for those previously known as Chamars, an oppressed community considered untouchable. Valmikis were known throughout the Gandhian period as Bhangis, Untouchables who clean lavatories and handle corpses. The new titles indicate a rejection of previous forms of servitude and humiliation. In New Delhi in 2001, representatives of all the South Asian countries plus Japan, South Africa, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Hong Kong, Britain and the United States came together to campaign against “racism and casteism”.

 

None of these conferences seems to have raised the question of racism. The great battle to identify casteism and untouchability as a form of racism came later, at the famous Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held in Durban, South Africa, 31 August–7 September 2001. Some sixty Dalit non-governmental representatives from India attempted to bring the discrimination against them to some sort of universal recognition. The Indian government refused to allow special international investigations of any sort, claiming that (1) caste does not denote race, (2) numerous laws and government schemes exist already to promote the welfare and rights of the Scheduled Castes, and (3) the government is trying hard enough to combat the evils of casteism.

 

One effort for international recognition of the Dalits’ plight has been quite successful. Followers of Ambedkar feel a connection to Columbia University in New York, site of his studies from 1913–16. In the last thirty years, several conferences have been held at Columbia, the most recent in June 2010. Dalit intellectuals joined other scholars in several days of discussion. An official “Ambedkar Lecture” was given by Nicholas Dirks, a distinguished a scholar of South Asian history and culture. An announcement was made of an Ambedkar Chair in constitutional studies at Columbia in honour of Ambedkar’s vital work on the Indian Constitution.

Views from the Inside

Two ways to understand more profoundly the situation of Dalits in India are (1) to read careful statistical and unbiased accounts of violence and discrimination against them, and (2) to examine Dalit autobiographies. In the first category, four publications in particular reveal the humiliations as well as the violence in the lives of Dalits. The previously cited Untouchability in Rural India documents such markers of discrimination as denial of entry into the home of a higher caste and cases registered under various laws such as the Anti-Untouchability Act of 1955 (renamed the Protection of Civil Rights Act in 1976) and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act of 1989. There are now about four hundred Scheduled Castes or jatis, 16.6 per cent of the Indian population, and the statistical studies in Untouchability in Rural India reveal the difficulties they face in various areas.

 

Broken People (1999) and Hidden Apartheid (2007) are studies sponsored by human-rights groups which note the continuing, even increasing, number of atrocities against Dalits and the nature of such crimes.⁷ Anand Teltumbde’s Khairlanji tells the story of a recent notorious incident of violence against a Dalit family. In the autumn of 2006, a mother, her daughter and two sons, one handicapped, were humiliated, tortured and killed when they objected to the confiscation of their land to make way for a road. The murderers were neighbours of a somewhat higher caste. Even though the attack took place in eastern Maharashtra, a thousand miles from Mumbai, it caused Dalit rioting in that city. More disturbances occurred when the Supreme Court reduced the death sentences of the villagers involved to years of imprisonment.⁸

 

In the 1990s, English translations of Dalit autobiographies began to appear in quantity. Beginning in Maharashtra, the idea of publishing autobiographies in translation so that they could be shared outside their language area spread to many regions and many classes. Some tell stories of success, of eventual triumph over adversity, such as Narendra Jadhav’s Outcaste: A Memoir, a best-seller in the Marathi language as Our Father and Us.⁹ Jadhav’ s father, under the influence of Ambedkar, made sure his sons were highly educated, and Jadhav himself is now a member of India’s Planning Commission. At the other end of the spectrum, Omprakash Valmiki’s Joothan (Leftover Food) details the harsh conditions of Untouchables in a north Indian village. It was the first major Hindi Dalit autobiography to be published in English.¹⁰ Almost as bleak is Joseph Macwan’s description of the community life of a weaver in Gujarat.¹¹

 

Two autobiographies deal with the troubled situation of illegitimate children born to an Untouchable woman and her higher-caste sponsor (in the case of Kishore Shantabai Kale’s dancer mother) or master, as in Sharankumar Limbale’s The Outcaste.¹² Vasant Moon, on the other hand, tells of the complex, colourful, lively life of a Nagpur locality of Mahars and the influence upon them of Ambedkar and the Buddhist conversion. Urmila Pawar, the only woman represented here, is a well-known short-story writer. The resilience of the Mahar in unpromising circumstances comes through in her writing.¹³ There are many more Dalit autobiographies and memoirs, and many more facets of Dalit life to be revealed in other language contexts. So far as I can tell, none suggests the author feels himself or herself to be of a separate race. The Dalits undoubtedly suffer from many disadvantages and severe types of discrimination. However, these perhaps ought not to be seen as racism, but an equally troubling casteism.

Endnotes

1. Ghanshyam Shah et al., Untouchability in Rural India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2006), pp. 134–5.

 

2. Rosalind O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology: Mahatma Jotirao Phule and Low-Caste Protest in Nineteenth-Century Western India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 141.

 

3. Eleanor Zelliot, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar and the Untouchable Movement (New Delhi: Blumoon, 2004), p. 43.

 

4. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Papers Microform of W. E. B. Du Bois (Sanford, N.C.: Microfilming Corporation of America, 1980), reel 58, frame 000-467.

 

5. See B. R. Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches, ed. Vasant Moon, especially volumes 5 and 12 (Bombay: Education Department, Government of Maharashtra, 1979).

 

6. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 22.

 

7. Smita Narula, Broken People: Caste Violence against India’s Untouchables (London, New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999); Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, Hidden Apartheid: Caste Discrimination against India’s “Untouchables” (New York: NYU School of Law, February 2007).

 

8. Anand Teltumbde, Khairlanji: A Strange and Bitter Crop (New Delhi: Navayana, 2008).

 

9. Narendra Jadhav, Outcaste: A Memoir (New Delhi: Viking Penguin, 2003), also published by Scribner in 2005 as Untouchables: My Family’s Triumphant Journey out of the Caste System in Modern India.

 

10. Omprakash Valmiki, Joothan: An Untouchable’s Life, trans. Arun Prabha Mukherjee (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

 

11. Joseph Macwan, The Stepchild: Angaliyat, trans. Rita Kothari (New Delhi: Oxford, 2004).

 

12. Kishore Shantabai Kale, Against All Odds, trans. Sandhya Pandey (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000); Sharankumar Limbale, The Outcaste: Akkarmashi, trans. Santosh Bhoomkar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003).

 

13. See, for example, Urmila Pawar, The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs, trans. Maya Pandit (Kolkata: Stree, 2008).