Dalit

• 1. Introduction

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  Dalits are a group of people who, for centuries, were placed entirely outside the fourfold hierarchy of the Hindu caste system. The word itself comes from the Sanskrit for "broken" or "scattered," and its modern Marathi form was put to use in the late 1880s by the Pune-based social reformer Jyotirao Phule to describe those crushed beneath India's social order. Over 200 million people in India carry this identity today. Almost every one of India's 600,000 villages, according to Dalit activist Paul Diwakar, contains a small pocket on the outskirts set aside for Dalit families. That spatial segregation is not incidental. It is the physical form of a legal, religious, and economic exclusion that has persisted across millennia, through independence, through constitutional reform, and into the present century. How did this exclusion take shape? What tools have Dalits used to resist it? And what does the landscape look like now, across education, politics, religion, and the diaspora?

• 2. The Making of a Word

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  Economist and reformer B. R. Ambedkar, who lived from 1891 to 1956, argued that untouchability entered Indian society around 400 CE, arising from conflict between Buddhism and Brahmanism. Some priests who befriended untouchables were demoted in the social order. The Bhakti-era figure Eknath, himself an excommunicated Brahmin, took up their cause centuries later. The word that eventually came to name these people has its own layered history. In Classical Sanskrit, "dalita" meant divided or split. By the 19th century it had been reshaped to mean someone outside the four Varnas. Phule applied it to the oppressed communities he championed. Before 1935 it also served as a translation for the British census classification "Depressed Classes." Ambedkar then widened it further, making it encompass all those excluded from the Varna system regardless of their specific caste background. The term gained fresh energy in the 1970s when the Dalit Panthers activist group adopted it. Scholars Oliver Mendelsohn and Marika Vicziany wrote in 1998 that the word had become "intensely political," warning that using it as a universal label risked implying a single unified radical politics where one did not fully exist. James Lochtefeld, a professor of religion and Asian studies, offered a different reading in 2002, saying its spread reflected the community's growing awareness and assertiveness in claiming legal and constitutional rights.

• 3. Movement Pioneers

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  Gopal Baba Walangkar, who lived from around 1840 to 1900, is generally regarded as the pioneer of the organized Dalit movement. He sought a society in which Dalits faced no discrimination. Harichand Thakur, born around 1812 and dying in 1878, built the Matua organisation around the Namasudra community in the Bengal Presidency. Ambedkar himself credited Walangkar as the movement's progenitor. The political framework that governs Dalit rights today traces back to the 1932 Poona Pact, struck between Ambedkar and Mahatma Gandhi. Ambedkar had demanded a separate electorate for Dalits; Gandhi opposed it with a hunger fast. The compromise Ambedkar accepted gave up the separate electorate in exchange for reserved seats in legislatures. That pact fed directly into the Government of India Act 1935, which introduced the term "Scheduled Castes" and attached to it the system of reserved seats. When India achieved independence in 1947, the 1950 Constitution banned untouchability and established reservations across government jobs and educational places. By 1995, Dalits held 10.1 per cent of Class I federal jobs, 12.7 per cent of Class II, 16.2 per cent of Class III, and 27.2 per cent of Class IV positions. At the most senior level of government agencies, however, only 1 per cent of posts were held by Dalits, a figure that had barely shifted in four decades.

• 4. Daily Life Under Exclusion

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  In 1855, Mutka Salve, a 14-year-old student of Dalit leader Savitribai Phule, described what Dalit communities endured under Baji Rao of the Maratha Empire: displacement from their lands, forced consumption of oil mixed with red lead, and use of their bodies in the foundations of buildings. Under those 17th-century rulers, human sacrifice of untouchable persons was, she wrote, not unusual. In the 21st century, discrimination takes different forms but has not disappeared. A 2014 survey by the National Council of Applied Economic Research and the University of Maryland, drawing on 42,000 households, estimated that 27 per cent of the Indian population still practices untouchability. Across faiths, untouchability was practiced by 52 per cent of Brahmins, 33 per cent of Other Backward Classes, 23 per cent of Sikhs, 18 per cent of Muslims, and 5 per cent of Christians. In the village of Ghatwani in Madhya Pradesh, the Scheduled Tribe population of Bhilala barred Dalit villagers from using the public borewell. In Southern India, some tea shops maintain a two-tumbler system, keeping a separate set of cups for serving Dalit customers. A 2014 ActionAid-funded survey in Madhya Pradesh schools found that 88 per cent discriminated against Dalit children. In 79 per cent of those schools, Dalit children were not allowed to touch mid-day meals. Klaus Klostermaier observed in 2010 that in rural India, Dalits "still live in secluded quarters, do the dirtiest work, and are not allowed to use the village well and other common facilities."

• 5. Occupations and Poverty

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  As of 2019, an estimated 40 to 60 per cent of the 6 million Dalit households in India were engaged in sanitation work. This connection between Dalit identity and sanitation is not coincidence. Their hereditary occupations were historically those that caste Hindus classified as "polluting": working with leather, disposing of dead animals, manual scavenging, and the collection and disposal of faeces from latrines. The Valmiki, also called Balmiki, caste is the most common Dalit community performing sanitation work. Others remain landless laborers or continue in leathercraft, tanning, cobbling, and the disposal of dead animals. According to the Socio Economic and Caste Census 2011, nearly 73 per cent of Dalit rural households ranked among the most deprived in India. Some 45 per cent of Scheduled Caste households are landless and earn a living through manual casual labour. A 2014 report to India's Ministry of Minority Affairs found that 33.8 per cent of rural Scheduled Caste populations were living below the poverty line in 2011-12. A 2012 survey by Mangalore University found that 93 per cent of Dalit families in Karnataka lived below the poverty line. Some Dalit intellectuals, among them Chandra Bhan Prasad, have argued that economic liberalisation beginning in 1991 has improved living standards for many, and they have supported that claim through large surveys.

• 6. Faith, Conversion, and Belonging

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  In 1956, Ambedkar launched the Dalit Buddhist movement and led several mass conversions from Hinduism to Buddhism. About half a million Dalits joined him in rejecting the caste system's religious underpinning. By the 2011 census, there were 6.5 million Marathi Buddhists in Maharashtra, mainly Dalit Buddhists. The first upper-caste Hindu temple to openly welcome Dalits was the Laxminarayan Temple in Wardha in 1928. The last King of Travancore issued a Temple Entry Proclamation in 1936. In 2015, a Dalit man of the Valmiki caste who was denied entry to a Hindu temple in Meerut converted to Islam. That same year, four Dalit women were fined by upper-caste Hindus for entering a temple in Karnataka. Mass conversions to Christianity also took place among lower-caste communities, including the Chuhras of Punjab, the Chamars of North India, the Vankars of Gujarat, and the Pulayas of Kerala. Even after conversion, discrimination persisted. In some South Indian churches during earlier periods, Dalit Christians attended mass outside or sat separately. Many were called by their Hindu caste names regardless of religion. Pandit Iyothee Thass, a Dalit Buddhist leader, founded the Sakya Buddhist Society of Tamil Nadu. In 1953, Sikh leader Master Tara Singh won government recognition of converted untouchable Sikh castes within the list of scheduled castes.

• 7. Politics and Law

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  Jagjivan Ram, born in 1908 and dying in 1986, was the first Scheduled Caste leader to emerge at the national level from Bihar. He served as a member of the Constituent Assembly that drafted India's constitution and held cabinet posts under Prime Ministers Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, and Indira Gandhi. His final government role was as Deputy Prime Minister in the Janata Party government of 1977-1979. In 1997, K. R. Narayanan became India's first Dalit President. Ramnath Kovind became the second in 2017. In Uttar Pradesh, Mayawati led the Bahujan Samaj Party to government, serving several terms as chief minister. Her 2007 victory was attributed in part to her ability to win support from roughly 17 per cent of Muslims and nearly 17 per cent of Brahmins alongside 80 per cent of Dalits. On the legislative side, the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe Prevention of Atrocities Act came into force in 1989. It designated specific crimes against Scheduled Castes and Tribes as "atrocities" subject to special prosecution, including forced labour, denial of access to water, and sexual abuse. A 2015 amendment addressed police obstruction of victims and extended the list of acts classed as atrocities. By April 2017, progress in establishing the exclusive Special Courts the Act required was reported to be unimpressive. P. L. Punia, a former chairman of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes, said that most courts were processing non-POA cases and that "the special prosecutors are not bothered and the cases filed under this Act are as neglected as the victims."

• 8. A Global Community

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  Equality Labs released a report in 2018 on "Caste in the United States" finding that one in two Dalit Americans live in fear of having their caste disclosed. Sixty per cent had experienced caste-based discriminatory jokes, and 25 per cent had suffered verbal or physical assault because of caste. In late June 2020, the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing filed a lawsuit against Cisco Systems, alleging that a Dalit engineer faced discrimination from two upper-caste supervisors. In the Caribbean, it is estimated that around one-third of immigrants who arrived in 1883 were Dalits; the shared experience of displacement gradually eroded caste barriers in those communities. In the United Kingdom, a 2009 report described caste discrimination as "rife" in workplaces and within the National Health Service. In 2018 the UK government decided not to include caste as a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010, opting instead to rely on case law. Dalit literature has accompanied this global spread. The 11th-century cobbler-saint Madara Chennaiah, who lived during the reign of the Western Chalukyas, is regarded by some scholars as the father of Vachana poetry. Jyotirao Phule's Gulamgiri, published in 1873, is considered a seminal text in Dalit writing. Baburao Bagul's 1963 collection "Jevha Mi Jat Chorali," or When I Had Concealed My Caste, is a turning point in Marathi Dalit literature. The Bangla Dalit literary movement began in 1992 following the suicide of Chuni Kotal. In California in 2023, the civil rights department was symbolically fined two thousand dollars for its case against two Cisco engineers, even as litigation against Cisco Systems itself continued.