The Dalit Question in Four Frames

Abstract

One of the most perceptive and comprehensive analyses of caste in India can be found in Ambedkar’s writings. He saw caste almost exclusively as a ritual-status hierarchy, and, as such, therefore rightly associated untouchability with Hindu ritual practices. Untouchability is integral to rituality inasmuch as it defines physical distances among individuals and groups in terms of purity and pollution. Such distances were indeed observed even within a family, between husband and wife, e.g., and even between a mother and her child, in the case of a menstruating woman. Some scholars mistakenly see such a practice of temporary and contextual ‘untouchability’ as comparable and qualitatively similar to the practice of caste Hindus treating the entire group of people as untouchables for centuries. In the case of the untouchability of an untouchable caste, it is a permanently fixed attribute that is meant to be inherited from generation to generation. This untouchability has little to do with the physical cleanliness or uncleanliness of the so-called untouchables. In their case, untouchability is treated as inherent in the bodies of untouchables. It is not the work they do which is defiling but what an untouchable does becomes defiling. Therefore, whatever object he/she touches, or on which he/she casts a shadow, is considered and treated as untouchable. In this sense, untouchability has been an extreme form of rituality (i.e., ritual practice).Traditionally, the arena of ritual practice was considered sacred and the observance of ritual purity was seen as endowing the practitioners with magical powers, making them pure bodies. Rituality thus constituted its own sacred sphere and that space was monopolized, in different degrees, by the communities of dwijas who were supposed, literally, to embody purity (i.e., the brahmans, the kshatriyas and the vaishyas).