Untouchability is the practice of treating members of particular castes as permanently and inherently polluting, so that contact with them — physical, and in extreme forms even visual or aural — is held to defile others. Unlike the temporary pollution incurred at birth, death or menstruation, which ritual can remove, the pollution ascribed to the untouchable is hereditary and irremovable. It cannot be washed off, outgrown or earned away. It follows the person from cradle to pyre and passes to the children.
The practice is therefore not simply prejudice or dislike. It is a system of enforced disability attached to birth, expressed in a dense set of prohibitions: exclusion from the village well and tank, from temples and their processional routes, from certain streets and quarters, from schools, tea shops and barbers, and above all from commensality and marriage with those above. Untouchable settlements were placed outside the village boundary, downwind and downstream. The obverse of exclusion was compulsion: the same groups were obliged to perform the tasks judged most polluting — removing carcasses, handling leather, cremation work, scavenging and the manual removal of human waste.
The two grounds: ideology and land
The ideological ground is the opposition of purity and pollution, which Louis Dumont placed at the centre of caste in Homo Hierarchicus. On this account the whole hierarchy is generated by a single principle, with the Brahmin at the pure pole and the untouchable at the impure pole, each necessary to the other. The untouchable is not merely at the bottom of the ladder; the untouchable is the ladder's outside, the residue whose impurity secures the purity of the top.
Dumont's account has been criticised for treating the ideology as the whole reality. The material ground is at least as important. Untouchable castes were, and largely remain, disproportionately landless. Denied the right to own land, to bear arms, to accumulate or to educate themselves, they were tied to dominant landholding castes through debt, attached labour and customary obligation. Ritual degradation and economic dependence reinforced each other: the man who must beg for work on another's field cannot refuse the work that degrades him, and the degradation then justifies his exclusion from anything better. Andre Beteille and later scholars have insisted that ritual rank, economic class and political power must be examined as distinct though overlapping dimensions.
Ambedkar's analysis
B. R. Ambedkar approached untouchability neither as a survival of primitive taboo nor as a lapse from true Hinduism, but as a structural product of the caste order and of the religious texts that sanctified it. In Annihilation of Caste he argued that caste is not a division of labour but a division of labourers, graded and hierarchically arranged, and that reform of practice without repudiation of its scriptural sanction would fail. In The Untouchables he advanced a historical hypothesis: that the untouchables were originally broken tribes settled at the edges of villages, whose adherence to Buddhism and to beef-eating marked them for permanent degradation as Brahmanical dominance consolidated.
He rejected the Gandhian framing of the problem as Harijan uplift — a matter of conscience, penance and benevolent service by caste Hindus. To call the untouchable a child of God, Ambedkar held, left intact the caste system that produced untouchability and cast the excluded as objects of charity rather than as bearers of rights. What was needed was political power, separate representation, education and finally exit: his conversion to Buddhism in 1956 was the logical conclusion of the argument. His insistence on constitutional guarantees rather than moral appeal shaped the shape of Indian law after 1950.
Abolition in law
Article 17 of the Constitution abolishes untouchability and forbids its practice in any form, making its enforcement an offence punishable by law — one of the very few constitutional provisions that binds private persons as well as the state. It was given statutory force by the Untouchability (Offences) Act of 1955, renamed and strengthened as the Protection of Civil Rights Act, 1955, which penalises the denial of access to temples, water sources, shops and public places. Because prosecutions under that Act proved weak, Parliament enacted the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, which defines a schedule of specific offences — forced consumption of noxious substances, land dispossession, sexual violence, social and economic boycott — and provides for special courts and mandatory investigation by senior officers.
Persistence in altered forms
The public and spectacular forms of untouchability have receded, particularly in towns, where the anonymity of the bus, the queue and the factory floor makes inspection of caste difficult. What survives is quieter and largely private. The village-level evidence gathered in Untouchability in Rural India documented separate utensils in tea shops, separate seating and separate drinking vessels in schools, restrictions on entry into upper-caste homes and temples, refusal of service by barbers and priests, segregated cremation grounds and separate residential quarters.
Three forms deserve emphasis. First, endogamy remains near-absolute: the inter-caste marriage rate stays very low, and violence against couples who cross the line is the most reliable index of the taboo's survival. Second, manual scavenging persists despite prohibition, and the labour of sanitation continues to be recruited almost entirely from the same castes. Third, the social boycott — withdrawal of employment, credit, water and passage — is the standard sanction against Dalit assertion, and it is precisely the weapon that leaves no mark on a charge sheet.
Why law has not been enough
Legal abolition removes sanction but not structure. Prosecution depends on a police station and a court that are themselves staffed and used by the local dominant caste; conviction rates under the atrocities legislation remain low and delays long. The offence is usually invisible, occurring inside shops, kitchens and marriage negotiations rather than in public. Above all, the practice rests on inequalities of land, credit and employment that no penal statute touches. Where Dalits have acquired education, non-agricultural work, urban residence and political organisation, exclusion has weakened; where they remain dependent on local landholders, the law is a distant instrument.
For the UPSC answer
Define untouchability by its distinguishing feature — pollution that is hereditary and permanent rather than temporary and removable — and show that it rests on two legs, the ritual ideology of purity and pollution and the material fact of landlessness and dependence. Use Ambedkar as your organising authority, contrasting his structural diagnosis and rejection of Harijan uplift with the reformist position, and connect it to Article 17, the Protection of Civil Rights Act and the Atrocities Act. Then make the central sociological point: the public forms have receded while private forms — commensality, endogamy, sanitation work and social boycott — endure. Conclude that legal abolition addresses the sanction but not the structure, and that change has come fastest where education, urbanisation and political assertion have altered the underlying dependence.
References & further reading
- Ambedkar, B. R. (1936). Annihilation of Caste. Bombay.
- Ambedkar, B. R. (1948). The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables. Amrit Book Co.
- Dumont, L. (1966). Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. University of Chicago Press.
- Mendelsohn, O. and Vicziany, M. (1998). The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India. Cambridge University Press.
- Shah, G., Mander, H., Thorat, S., Deshpande, S. and Baviskar, A. (2006). Untouchability in Rural India. Sage.
- Thorat, S. and Newman, K. (eds.) (2010). Blocked by Caste: Economic Discrimination in Modern India. Oxford University Press.