Purity and pollution name the ritual opposition on which caste ranking rests: certain substances, contacts, occupations and bodily states are held to be impure and to transmit impurity, and a caste's position is fixed by how far its customary way of life keeps it clear of them. Purity here is not hygiene. It is a ritual and religious quality, restored by prescribed acts — bathing, fasting, cow's-milk products, mantra, the services of a barber or washerman — and lost by prescribed contacts.

The idea supplies caste with its logic. Endogamy, commensal rules, occupational inheritance and the ban on touch are not four separate customs but one principle applied to marriage, food, work and the body. G. S. Ghurye listed restrictions on feeding and social intercourse, hierarchy, and civil and religious disabilities among the six features of caste in Caste and Race in India (1932), and the common thread running through them is the management of pollution.

Permanent and temporary pollution

Sociologists distinguish two forms. Temporary pollution attaches to events in the life of any person, however high: birth, death, menstruation, eating, haircutting, contact with bodily emissions. It is time-bound and removable by ritual, and it explains why even a Brahmin is periodically impure. Permanent pollution, by contrast, is ascribed to a group by birth and cannot be removed at all. Castes whose hereditary occupations involve leather, carcasses, sweeping, scavenging, cremation or washing others' clothes are treated as permanently impure. Untouchability is thus not an incidental cruelty added to caste but structural pollution — impurity built into the definition of a group.

The regulation of contact

Pollution rules translate into detailed prohibitions. Commensality is ranked: who may accept kachcha and pakka food from whom, who may drink from whose vessel, who may sit in the same row. Endogamy protects the group's ritual substance across generations, and hypergamous or inter-caste marriage is punished because it dissolves the boundary. Occupational restriction ties impurity to a livelihood. In its extreme forms colonial-era ethnography recorded rules of distance pollution in Kerala and untouchable groups barred from village wells, streets, temples and schools. Srinivas's Coorg study showed how these rules also provided the grammar of mobility: a group could argue for a higher rank only by demonstrating a purer way of living, which is what sanskritisation describes.

Dumont's Homo Hierarchicus

Louis Dumont made the boldest claim. In Homo Hierarchicus (French 1966, English 1970) he argued that the opposition of pure and impure is the single ideological principle generating the caste system. From it he derived the three necessary features of caste — separation, division of labour and hierarchy — and the further proposition that in India status encompasses power: the Brahmin outranks the king because the religious is superior to the temporal. India, on this reading, is a homo hierarchicus civilisation, defined by holism and hierarchy, against the West's individualism and equality.

The critique of Dumont

The criticism is now as canonical as the theory. Gerald Berreman called it “the Brahmanical view of caste” — an account written from the top of the system, built from Sanskrit texts rather than from the experience of those at the bottom, who describe caste as exploitation and not as a shared ideology. This is the classic charge of a book view displacing the field view: Srinivas's dominant caste showed land and numbers, not purity, deciding who ruled a village. Ambedkar had already located caste in graded inequality and religious sanction rather than in a benign encompassing whole. Dipankar Gupta argues that castes assert difference and competing origin myths rather than agreeing on a single ranking, so hierarchy is contested from within. Others object that Dumont's ideology-versus-power split immunises the theory against evidence, and that treating India as hierarchy's pure type against an individualist West is orientalist.

Erosion and persistence

Change has been uneven, and the pattern is instructive. In public and anonymous spheres pollution rules have weakened sharply: buses, trains, schools, offices, hospitals, urban restaurants and factory canteens make contact unavoidable and untraceable. Constitutional abolition of untouchability under Article 17, temple-entry legislation, reservation and the 1989 Prevention of Atrocities Act gave the erosion legal force. But in intimate spheres the rules persist: marriage remains overwhelmingly endogamous, and the survey reported in Untouchability in Rural India (2006), covering hundreds of villages across eleven states, documented continuing exclusion from temples, water sources, separate utensils in tea shops, segregated seating at village functions and denial of service by barbers. Manual scavenging, honour killings and atrocity cases show that permanent pollution has been outlawed faster than it has been abandoned.

For the UPSC answer

Open by defining purity and pollution as a ritual, not hygienic, opposition, and show that endogamy, commensality and occupational closure are one principle applied in three domains. Distinguish temporary from permanent pollution, and name untouchability as structural pollution — that distinction earns marks quickly. Present Dumont as the strongest statement of the principle and then set Berreman, Ambedkar and Dipankar Gupta against him as the book-view critique. Close with the public-versus-intimate asymmetry, citing Article 17 alongside the 2006 Untouchability in Rural India findings.

References & further reading

  1. Dumont, L. (1970). Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. University of Chicago Press. (French original 1966.)
  2. Ghurye, G. S. (1932). Caste and Race in India. Kegan Paul.
  3. Srinivas, M. N. (1952). Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India. Clarendon Press.
  4. Berreman, G. D. (1971). ‘The Brahmanical View of Caste’. Contributions to Indian Sociology (New Series), 5.
  5. Shah, G., Mander, H., Thorat, S., Deshpande, S. and Baviskar, A. (2006). Untouchability in Rural India. Sage.
  6. Gupta, D. (2000). Interrogating Caste. Penguin.