Caste Hindus vs.

Scheduled Castes
About a Colonial Distinction and Its Impact

Jakob De Roover
Ghent University, Belgium

One of the most peculiar dimensions of the Indian legal system lies in its legislation related to caste.
The Constitution gives equal rights to all citizens and hence prohibits discrimination on grounds of
caste, religion, race, sex or place of birth. However, it also foresees a series of special provisions which
appear to discriminate precisely on grounds of caste. Some examples:

Article 15 prohibits discrimination on grounds of caste, but also adds that nothing in the
relevant article shall prevent the State from making any special provision for the advancement
of any socially and educationally backward classes of citizens or for the Scheduled Castes and
the Scheduled Tribes.

Article 16 says: There shall be equality of opportunity for all citizens in matters relating to
employment or appointment to any office under the State. It says that no citizen shall on
grounds only of caste be discriminated against in respect of any employment or office under
the State. But then it adds that nothing in the article shall prevent the State from making
special provisions in public service for reservation in matters of promotion in favour of the
Scheduled Castes and Tribes, which, in the opinion of the State, are not adequately
represented in the services under the State.

Article 17 concerns the abolition of untouchability and says its practice in any form is
forbidden: The enforcement of any disability arising out of Untouchability shall be an
offence punishable in accordance with law.

Part XVI of the Constitution stipulates special provisions relating to certain classes. These
provide for the reservation of seats for Scheduled Castes and Tribes in the national parliament
and the state-level legislative assemblies. One of the articles also says that the claims of the
members of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes shall be taken into consideration,

consistently with the maintenance of efficiency of administration, in the making of

appointments to services and posts in connection with the affairs of the Union or of a State.
It allows for provisions in favour of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes for relaxation in qualifying
marks in any examination or lowering the standards of evaluation, and for reservations in
promotion to services and posts in the public sector.
Since the framing of the Constitution, several new laws have been enacted and the number of groups
benefiting from caste-based reservations has grown. The Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes
(Prevention of Atrocities) Act of 1989 is one of the important pieces of legislation. It lists a series of
offences that generally constitute violations of criminal law, such as: forcing people to drink or eat any
inedible or obnoxious substance; forcibly removing clothes from a person and parading them naked or
with painted face or body; wrongfully occupying or cultivating land owned by another person;
instituting false, malicious, vexatious legal proceedings; corrupting or fouling the water of a spring or
other source used by people ... In this act, however, these crimes get a special status as so-called
offences of atrocities. What does the special status consist of? Well, for instance, the act stipulates
more severe punishments for several of these violations than the same crimes would receive under the
general penal code of India. It also establishes special courts and proceedings for dealing with such
atrocities. Now, what gives the violations this special status as atrocities? It is the fact that the
perpetrator is not a member of a Scheduled Caste or Tribe, while the victim is a member of a Scheduled
Caste or Tribe.
It must be clear then that membership of a particular set of caste groups plays a crucial role in
the way the legal system of contemporary India deals with its citizens. In this article, I do not intend
to develop any normative criticism or endorsement of the relevant laws. I will not even look into the
moral justification and legal rationale that may or may not exist for giving such special treatment to
certain caste groups and their members. I will also refrain from assessing the actual implementation
or effects of these legal measures. Instead, I want to look at the empirical and conceptual foundations
of the laws related to caste.
Even here, the focus will be on certain problems raised by the very bodies that framed these
laws. For obvious reasons, it has been crucial to identify which groups in Indian society belong to the
set of castes that should get the privileges accorded by law: since membership of this set implies access
to quota, a lowering of examination requirements, and other special protection and provisions, this
identification could not be taken lightly. Hence, one would expect that this issue was of supreme
importance at the time when the Constituent Assembly framed this legislation: Which properties were

to distinguish the caste groups that belonged to this privileged set? If the selection was not to happen
in a haphazard way, how could one recognize those groups that deserved reservations and other legal
benefits?
Section 1: The article will first examine how this issue confronted the Constituent Assembly in
its work between 1947 and 1949. Many Assembly members spoke in terms of an opposition between
two communities or groups in Indian society: Caste Hindus and Depressed Classes. This split was
supposedly founded in the practice of untouchability, that is, the Depressed Classes could be
recognized because they were considered untouchables. However, several Assembly members
pointed out problems in this distinction and its use of the notion of untouchability. Still, the process
of framing the laws on caste continued without addressing these problems. It was as though the
existence of Depressed Classes that deserved special benefits in contrast to the Caste Hindus who
did not was self-evident.
Section 2: Why could the Constituent Assembly consider this a self-evident fact? Possibly, the
existence of these two distinct groups in Indian society had been established long before these debates
of the late 1940s. Like Scheduled Castes, Depressed Classes was a categorization that postIndependence India had inherited from British colonial rule. In the first decades of the 20th century,
colonial institutions systematically made use of the distinction between Caste Hindus and Depressed
Classes. Therefore, the second section of the article will examine as to what allowed the British to
recognize these two distinct groups (or sets of groups) among the Hindus. Once again, the notion of
untouchability played a central role here and again it met with fundamental difficulties. Much like the
Constituent Assembly, the British papered over these difficulties and proposed separate electorates
and other benefits for the Depressed Classes. To them, it appeared equally obvious that it made sense
to divide the Hindus into Caste Hindus and Depressed Classes.
Section 3: To find out what made this categorization so evident, we need to examine the general
discourse about the caste system of this era. During the 1930s, the most important debate on the issue
of caste and untouchability was that between Dr. B.R. Ambedkar and Mahatma Gandhi. They both
shared the idea that Hindu society was divided into two groupings: Caste Hindus and Untouchables.
To begin to answer this question, I will briefly show how this terminology emerged from certain
contingent steps taken by British census officials. In the process, they discovered that empirical
identification of the Untouchables as a distinct group or set of groups in Indian society turned out to
be impossible and that the distinction lacked conceptual coherence.

In the conclusion, we will take one last step in what is beginning to appear like an infinite
regress to answer the question: How did the conviction emerge that the Scheduled Castes should be
considered as a distinct class or community in Indian society, which should retain special benefits and
provisions in post-Independence India? The answer will turn out to be surprising, given the fact that
India declared itself independent almost seventy years ago.

1. Caste Hindus and Depressed Classes

In todays India, it is common parlance to speak of Dalits and Caste Hindus as two distinct sections
of the population. This way of speaking is especially popular among academics, activists, journalists,
and political leaders. Even though these two sets of people consist of a huge number of very different
jatis and other groups, there is a sense in which they are said to make up two distinct groups or even
communities. Dalits, one often hears, is the name preferred by the castes formerly called
Untouchables to refer to themselves. Going by the meaning of this name, they are the oppressed.
Of course, many people are oppressed in all kinds of ways, so it cannot just be the state of being
oppressed that characterizes this group.
In one sense, the criterion is clear: to count as a Dalit one should belong to one of the
Scheduled Castes. This means that one should be a member of one of the more than one thousand
groups listed in the Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order, which is essential to the functioning of
the caste-related laws of India. Now, to understand the rationale behind these laws and schedules, the
most obvious step is to turn to the legislative body that framed them: the Constituent Assembly. How,
then, did the Assembly discuss this matter and which problems came up during these debates?
One of the very first things that the Assembly had to do was to elect a permanent chairman.
After the members had elected Dr Rajendra Prasad on 11 December 1946, they congratulated him
profusely. One Assembly member said he spoke on behalf of the 60 millions of untouchable classes,
the tillers of the soil and hewers of wood, who have been in the lowest rungs of the ladder of political
and economical Status of this country. What is interesting about this intervention is that the
Assembly member uses a series of different terms to refer to the classes he says he represents. He uses
the following terms as equivalents: untouchable classes, Scheduled-Castes, Harijans, Harijan
communities, Scheduled Classes, untouchables. He says that the 60 millions of untouchables form
the backbone of Hinduism and expresses his certainty that all the disabilities of these Harijans will

be remedied in a manner that they may enjoy equal privileges in this great country. Note the claim
here: the untouchables or Harijans are followers of Hinduism who suffer certain disabilities.
Two days later, the term caste Hindu also made its appearance in the Assembly debates,
when several members expressed their indignation at a debate that had taken place in the House of
Lords in London. Some members of the British Conservatives in the opposition had dismissed the
Constituent Assembly as a Caste Hindu institution, which would threaten India with a Hindu Raj
if it continued the work of framing a constitution for the country. Indeed, on 16 December, the British
Parliament had held a debate about the Constituent Assembly that had just been constituted in Delhi.
This debate is very interesting for our purposes, because much of it revolved around the status of the
so-called Depressed Classes as against the Caste Hindus.
It all started when Viscount Simon of the Conservatives first claimed that the Assembly was
but a body of Hindus and then addressed the following question to the Secretary of State: do the
Government regard what is going on in Delhi at this moment as the Constituent Assembly? This is
not a hypothetical question, he added, since these people are meeting now, at this minute, all by
themselves, and the most recent declarations of Pandit Nehru show how much importance he attaches
to the idea that he and his caste Hindus should constitute the Constituent Assembly which the
Government propose. Could this meeting of caste Hindus at Delhi be regarded as the Constituent
Assembly at all? Viscount Simons concern was that the attempt to establish a Government in India,
not by co-operation between the major communities, but by reliance on the Hindu majority, threatens
India with civil war, with anarchy and bloodshed on an unlimited scale. His next statement shows
which communities he was referring to: To the Caste Hindus we should say that the British
Parliament well understands the inspiration that is drawn from the prospect of complete freedom, but
that the freedom must be for others, the 90,000,000 Moslems, the 50,000,000 Untouchables, as well
as for themselves.
We learn a lot from these words: first of all, Viscount Simon views the Caste Hindus, the
Muslims, and the Untouchables as three separate communities that need to cooperate in establishing
the Indian Government. Consequently, he sees the Muslims and Untouchables as two minorities,
distinct from the dominant Hindu majority. In the case of Muslims, it is relatively clear how the
different Muslim groups could be viewed as making up a religious minority, since they share a religious
affiliation of some kind. But how could one say the same for the hundreds of jatis that this British Lord
unites into a community? What made them into a community as opposed to another community called
the Caste Hindus? This distinction between communities was extremely important, according to

Viscount Simon: not taking it into account in the creation of the new constitution for India could lead
to civil war, anarchy and bloodshed on an unlimited scale.
This was not the idiosyncratic view of Viscount Simon. The Earl of Scarborough joined him in
raising the question of the position of the Scheduled Castes in the Constituent Assembly. Though
not a vital problem, he said, it is one which the House of Lords would do well not to ignore, for this
communityor rather this collection of communitiesis not well organized. It does not command
the resources with which it can press its case, and its immemorial plight demands that its voice should
be heard. My contention is, the Earl added, that the manner in which the Scheduled Castes are
represented in the Constituent Assembly does not reflect the wishes and the opinions of the Scheduled
Castes themselves. Here, we see a qualification: the Scheduled Castes (no longer called the
untouchables) form a community or rather a collection of communities. Yet, the Earl assumes, this
community or collection of communities not only shares one voice, but also another fundamental
property, namely, its immemorial plight.
Of course, this immemorial plight is a rather mysterious reference. It related to the
subsequent discussion, where the focus shifted to the following issue: according to the British
Parliament, are the Scheduled Classes or Scheduled Castes one of the minorities in Indian society that
would be protected under the new Constitution? Another Viscount said he had met Ambedkar and
reported that this issue was the latters major anxiety: Ambedkar wanted the Scheduled Castes to be
recognized as a minority in Indian society, so that they would get the special status accorded to
minorities by colonial law. In response, one member of the House of Lords said: The Scheduled Castes
are technically a minority, but they are a very numerous one; there are some 60,000,000 of them
(972). For Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Governor-General of India, there was no doubt:
The Government certainly regard the Scheduled Castes as a minority. They are certainly one of
the principal peoples to whom the statement made in the course of our Mission in India applies
and in respect of which the British Government would require to be satisfied. There have been
debates and fine points taken as to whether they are a minority or not, but, from our point of
view, it is certainly our intention that they are one of the peoples with whom the Minorities
Commission would deal. (987-8; emphasis added.)
That the Scheduled Castes counted as a minority deserving certain protections might be a technical
decision of the British Government. Nevertheless, it does presuppose that the set of groups grouped
together by the British Government in India could be seen as a minority community in some relevant

sense. In fact, the Governor-General calls them one of the peoples coming under minority protection. So
the Scheduled Castes now constitute a people. For all of this to be possible, this variety of groups should
share some recognizable characteristics that could make them into a minority people or community.
From London back to Delhi then. Some Constituent Assembly members reacted with
indignation to these statements and to similar claims made by Winston Churchill, who had among
other things said that the Assembly represented only one major community in India, referring to the
Caste Hindus. However, the discussion did not challenge the view that one could sensibly speak of
two communities in Indian society, the majority Caste Hindus and the minority Scheduled Castes. It
merely focused on the concern that such allegations about inadequate representation for the Scheduled
Castes would prevent the latter from joining the nationalist forces in India.
In fact, throughout the Assembly debates, one notes that members speak of the Depressed
Classes or Scheduled Castes as a community of some sort, as opposed to the Caste Hindus. Especially
those representing these groups often began their interventions by saying that they spoke in the name
of the community which they represented: that of Depressed Classes, Harijans, or Untouchables.
Some made this very explicit and suggested this division of community had a racial foundation. On
the 20th of January 1947, Sri S. Nagappa of Madras put it as follows:
We, the Harijans and Adivasis are the real sons of the soil, and we have every right to frame
the Constitution of this country. Even the so-called Caste Hindus who are not real Indians,
can go, if they want. (Interruptions.) Sir, today we are asking the Britisher to quit. For what
reason? Is he not a human being? Has he not a right to live in the country? We ask him to quit
because he is a foreigner. So, Sir, we have also a right to ask the Aryan, the migrator to go. We
have a right to ask the Mohammedan, the invader, to go out of this country. There is only one
consideration. The Caste Hindus of this country do not have any other place to go to. That is
the only consideration that they deserve.
In this passage, we note one element that contributed to presenting Caste Hindus and Harijans as two
communities. For Nagappa, the now completely discredited Aryan Invasion Theory showed that
Harijans and Adivasis could be distinguished from Caste Hindus on racial grounds: they were the
communities consisting of the original inhabitants of India, while the Caste Hindus were the Aryan
invaders, who could be asked by the original inhabitants to go and leave the Indian soil.

The next day, one Mr. H.J. Khandejar (C. P. and Berar: General) stepped in to say he was a
Harijan and would place before you the voice of 90 millions of Harijans in India. These Harijans
constituted a community, he added: The Harijan Community is accepting this Resolution with great
pleasure for the sole reason that the Resolution, embodies safeguards for all the minorities in India.
However, in contrast to Ambedkars claim I am not a Hindu, this Assembly member asserted that,
even though the Harijans have been and are still being subjected to endless oppressions and
cruelties, they never thought of abandoning their faith: We are Hindus, will remain Hindus and will
secure our rights as Hindus. Somewhat more confusingly, he added: Undoubtedly we are Hindus
and we will, as Hindus, fight the Hindus and secure our rights. Khandejar repeated the same claims
in the discussion on the resolution about the new flag for India, where he said, as the President of the
All India Depressed Classes Union, that saffron represented the colour of his community, the
Depressed classes.
Similarly, Srimati Dakshayani Velayudan (Madras: General) complained during another
session that no Harijans name was included among the Hindu representatives in the Muslim
Provinces: We, Harijans, consider ourselves one with the Hindu community and we have every right
to represent the Hindus in the Muslim Provinces. Later, she referred to the Harijans as a community,
a vast regiment of people who are subjected to untold miseries for so many centuries. Here, a new
question is added to the claim that one can distinguish two communities, Caste Hindus and Harijans:
Are they both sub-communities of the Hindus? Or do the Harijans or Untouchables fall outside the
Hindu community?
Of course, there are cases where a sub-section of a religion could possibly be considered a
minority: say, Shias in a Sunni-dominated Islamic country may count as a minority community, even
though both groups are Muslims. However, in those cases, we can explain what makes both groups
into Muslims (the belief in Allah and Mohammad as the last prophet, for instance) and what
distinguishes them as two communities (the conflict about the role of Ali as the Caliph, for instance).
In the case of Caste Hindus and Harijans, however, how could this issue be settled? The name Hindus
had been introduced by Europeans to refer to the heathens or idolaters of the country that lay
beyond the Indus. In the late eighteenth century, they developed the idea that there was a religion
named Hinduism and that its followers were Hindus. From the early nineteenth century until today,
scholars have agreed that it is impossible to say which common properties (beliefs or practices) allow
one to distinguish Hindus as the followers of this religion. Did the Constituent Assembly members
then have any coherent way to establish whether or not Caste Hindus and Depressed Classes are
two communities within the larger category of Hindus?

Untouchability appeared to play a crucial role as a property that distinguished the Depressed
Classes (or Scheduled Castes or Harijans) from the Caste Hindus. But then it was unclear what this
meant. The obscurity surfaced in several sessions of the Assembly. Take the exchange on 29 April
1947 about the Fundamental Rights constitutional article that asserted the abolition of untouchability.
A participant said that he did not understand how untouchability could be abolished without
abolishing the very caste system: Untouchability is nothing but the symptom of the disease, namely,
the caste system. Of course, a symptom should be recognized in order to provide a correct diagnosis
of the disease. And here came the rub. One Assembly member said the article did not properly define
the offense it wanted to abolish: As it stands, the word untouchability is very vague. Another
member pointed out that the claim that untouchability in any form is an offence required a
definition: One magistrate will consider a particular thing to be untouchability, while another
magistrate may hold a different thing to be untouchability, with the result there will be no uniformity
on the part of the magistracy in dealing with offences. But the problem went beyond definitions:
Moreover, untouchability means different things in different areas. In Bengal, untouchability means
one thing, while in other provinces, it means an entirely different thing. Dr. S.C. Bannerjee of Bengal
explained the problem in some detail:
Mr. President, the word untouchability actually requires clarification. We have been
accustomed to this word for the last 25 years, still there is a lot of confusion as to what it
connotes. Sometimes it means merely taking a glass of water and sometimes it has been used
in the sense of admission of Harijans into temples, sometimes it meant inter-caste dinner,
sometimes inter-caste marriage. Mahatma Gandhi who is the main exponent of
untouchability, has used it in various ways and on different occasions with different
meanings. So when we are going to use the word untouchability, we should be very clear in
our mind as to what we really mean by it. What is the real implication of this word?
Bannerjees intervention points to an intruiging fact: On the one hand, the word untouchability
apparently had been used for only 25 years, so it must have been a newly introduced term that had no
obvious equivalent in Indian languages. On the other hand, after using it for 25 years, it was still
completely unclear what the word meant and which practices it referred to. Even the English term was
used in very different ways in different regions and provinces, it turned out. How could it then count
as a property to distinguish the community or community of communities called the Depressed
Classes or Untouchables?

The problem of the obscurity of the term untouchable kept coming back in the debates. More
than one year later, on November 29th, 1948, a Muslim representative from West Bengal, Mr.
Naziruddin Ahmad, stated it as follows:
The word untouchability has no legal meaning, although politically we are all well aware of
it; but it may lead to a considerable amount of misunderstanding as in a legal expression. The
word untouchable can be applied to so many variety of things that we cannot leave it at that.
It may be that a man suffering from an epidemic or contagious disease is an untouchable; then
certain kinds of food are untouchable to Hindus and Muslims. According to certain ideas
women of other families are untouchables. Then according to Pandit Thakurdas Bhargava, a
wife below 15 would be untouchable to her loving husband on the ground that it would be
marital misbehaviour. I beg to submit, Sir, that the word untouchable is rather loose.
Ahmad tried to give the term a better shape, he said, by inserting that no one on account of his
religion or caste be regarded as untouchable. Untouchability on the ground of religion or caste is what
is prohibited. This leads to the next question: How do we recognize untouchability on the ground of
religion or caste and distinguish it from other forms of untouchability?
This was a vexing issue because untouchability had to count as the criterion that distinguishes
the Depressed Classes from the Caste Hindus. Among the many groups included in the Depressed
Classes, many of these practiced untouchability towards other groups also belonging to the
Depressed Classes. The so-called untouchability was practiced among and between these castes,
which seemed to consider each other as untouchables. Inevitably, this would also count as
untouchability on the ground of religion or caste. But how could this property then distinguish the
Untouchables from the Caste Hindus?
A typical rebuttal to such doubts suggested that originally untouchability had been practiced
by Caste Hindus towards the Untouchables and the latter just started imitating it later on. But this is
a red herring, since it already presupposes that we can recognize Untouchables and distinguish them
from Caste Hindus. In fact, the entire route leads to a vicious circle: There are all kinds of situations
where human beings seem to consider each other untouchable. Basically, the claim is the following: If
one human being refrains from touching or approaching another human being, this becomes castebased untouchability when the former belongs to the Caste Hindus, while the latter belongs to the
Untouchable Castes. And how can one recognize these Untouchable Castes? Well, they are the ones
that are subject to caste-based untouchability. This is like saying: When one person declares his love

10

to another, it is true love only when that second person is lovable. And how do you recognize a lovable
person? Well, they are the persons that others feel true love for.
In the end, the general modus operandi of the Constituent Assembly was to paper over such
problems. No real need was felt to think about how it made sense to view the Scheduled Castes as a
minority community that needed special provisions and protection. By which characteristics could one
recognize groups belonging to this community or community of communities? This was not seen
as a serious cognitive question, but as something that could be solved by appointing a committee,
which would stipulate some ad hoc definition and then add a number of castes to an already existing
schedule. Yet, as we know, this did not solve the problem, since more and more new groups have
begun to claim that they should also count as Scheduled Castes.
In May 1949, in the end phases of the Constituent Assemblys work, Shri Mahavir Tyagi put
things in a sharp way: The term Scheduled Castes is a fiction. Factually there is no such thing as
Scheduled Castes. There are a variety of castes with different problem situations, he said: All their
names were collected from the various provinces and put into one category Scheduled Castes. In spite
of the category being a fiction it has been there for so many years. He asked: How is Dr. Ambedkar
a member of the Scheduled Castes? Is he illiterate? Is he ill-educated? Is he an untouchable? Is he
lacking in anything? There were many similar cases, he added: There are thousands of Brahmins and
Kshatriyas who are worse off than these friends belonging to the scheduled castes. So by the name of
Scheduled Caste, persons who are living a cheerful life, and a selected few of these castes get benefit.
This is no real representation. No caste ever gets benefit out of this reservation. It is the individual or
the family which gets benefited.
Its all a fiction, Tyagi repeated again and again. These remarks point to an important fact:
Scheduled Castes was a category created by legal decree, not even by the Constituent Assembly of
post-Independence India, but by the state apparatus of the British Raj. The Government of India Act of
1935 introduced the terminology, as it provided lists of groups for every province of British India in
schedules attached to the main texts of the act. In the Government of India (Scheduled Castes) Order
of 1936, the Kings Excellent Majesty ordered that the castes, races or tribes, or parts of or groups within
castes, races or tribes specified in Parts I to IX of the Schedule to this Order shall, in the Provinces to
which those Parts respectively relate, be deemed to be scheduled castes so far as regards members
thereof resident in the localities specified in relation to them respectively in those Parts of that
Schedule. In other words, King Edward VIII, Monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and

11

Ireland, ordered which people in Indian society were to become members of Scheduled Castes. This is
how the Scheduled Castes had come into being and not any other way.
Now, there are two options: either King Edwards order was a reflection of the factual structure
of Indian society that is, the list of castes in His schedules corresponded to an existing community,
category, or social grouping in Indian society; or this order had simply invented a community or
distinction between communities where there was none. If the first was the case, then the Scheduled
Castes Order of 1936 should be the result of research that proved the existence of such a division of
social groups or communities in Indian society. If the second is true, then the caste legislation of
contemporary India simply enforces a decree of the British King and his government that commanded that the Indian
people should be divided along certain lines a decree which in turn rests on conceptual and empirical quicksand.
Hence, it becomes all the more important to find out how the British government officials had come
to their distinction between Caste Hindus and Depressed Classes and how they had on that basis
drafted the Scheduled Castes lists.

2. The Colonial Classifications

In 1932, the British Prime Minister gave the instruction to the Indian Franchise Committee led by
Lord Lothian to find out the extent to which the depressed classes would be likely, through such
general extension of the franchise as you may recommend, to secure the right to vote in ordinary
electorates. The Committees inquiry into the general problem of extending the franchise was also
expected to produce facts which would facilitate the devising of a method of separate representation
for the depressed classes. In the chapter of its report that dealt with these instructions, the Committee
stated: The first problem which confronted us was to decide who the depressed classes are (Indian
Franchise Committee Report, 1932, pp. 112-3, 279).1
In 1916, the report recounted, the Government of India had already addressed a letter to local
Governments stating that some definition was required of the term depressed classes. The Indian
Legislative Council suggested that the expression depressed classes should include: (a) criminal and
wandering tribes; (b) aboriginal tribes; and (c) untouchables. In 1917, Sir Henry Sharp, Educational

East India (Constitutional Reforms): Indian Franchise Committee, Vol. 1: Report of the Indian Franchise Committee 1932.
Presented by the Secretary of State for India to Parliament by Command of His Majesty, May, 1932. London: His
Majestys Stationery Office.
1

12

Commissioner with the Government of India, prepared a list of the depressed classes, while pointing
out some problems in the use of the term:
The depressed classes form the unclean castes whose touch or even shadow is pollution. But
a wider significance is often attached to the expression, so that it includes communities which
though not absolutely outside the pale of caste, are backward and educationally poor and
despised and also certain classes of Muhammadans. Some have interpreted it as simply
educationally backward. The task of defining is made difficult by doubt as to where the lines
should be drawn and the elastic differences of such classes as dwell on the borderland of
respectability. Sometimes the whole community declares itself to be depressed with a view to reaping
special concessions of education or appointment. (p. 113, 279; italics added.)
The Committee members made no secret of the fact that the term depressed classes grouped together
widely variegated sets of people. However, it said: The grouping together of such diverse elements
for the administrative convenience of Government in dealing with questions relating to the social and
economic uplift of these people gave rise to no public criticism.
In 1919, the Southborough Franchise Commiteee divided the Hindu community into three
classes, Brahmins, non-Brahmins and others, and in the category of others, it included only the
untouchables. It adopted the test of untouchability to identify the depressed classes, while the
Statutory Commission defined this criterion as causes pollution by touch or by approach within a
certain distance. The Indian Central Committee also confined the term depressed classes to those
who are classed as untouchables. The Lothian Committee decided to follow the same route: If the
depressed classes are to be recognised as a distinct element of the population for political purposes,
it is necessary, so far as possible, to have a more precise classification of them. It suggested that the
term should not include primitive or aboriginal tribes, nor should it include those Hindus who are
only economically poor and in other ways backward but are not regarded as untouchables. For the
purpose of the present inquiry, its chairman had said, the term should be interpreted as meaning
untouchability, that is to say, pollution by touch or approach. The Committee members agreed that
this appears to be the nearest approach to a general formula that can be laid down to define the
depressed classes and using this test they would collect definite population figures of these classes
(pp. 113-4, 280-284).
This first series of remarks in the Lothian Committee report gives us a first look into the way
the British had dealt with the issue of identifying the Depressed Classes. On the one hand, they saw
the grouping together of these so-called classes as a matter of administrative convenience. They said that

13

these classes were to be recognized as a distinct element of the population for political purposes. That is
why a precise classification was needed. If such a grouping happens for administrative convenience
and political purposes only, it refers to a practical classification that should allow the colonial state to
deal with certain sets of the population and not to an empirically existing community. It is a
classification like many others for purely administrative purposes: all citizens who have a secondary
education degree or, say, the self-employed or people older than 65. On the other hand, however, this
appeared to shift when they used the term Depressed Classes only to refer to the untouchables. The
British saw these untouchables as a sub-section of the Hindus and did seem to suggest that these
constituted a distinct group or community in society.
Even in the second case, the question of identifying the untouchables remained. To draft the
lists of Depressed Classes, the Lothian Committee turned to the colonial governments census reports:
The actual classification of castes by the application of certain social criteria or tests can be undertaken
on detailed and scientific lines only during a census of the whole population, and we must therefore
turn to the census reports for guidance in this matter. The Committee took what they called two
generally accepted tests of untouchability from the 1911 Census Superintendents, who had been
instructed to enumerate castes and tribes classed as Hindus who do not conform to certain standards,
or are subject to certain disabilities. The tests that people who lived up to the following criteria should
be considered untouchables: (7) are denied access to the interior of ordinary Hindu temples, (8) cause
pollution, (a) by touch, (b) within a certain distance (p. 114, 285).
Turning to the census results was a dubious move, since their classification of depressed
classes had met with all kinds of difficulties. The 1921 Census Commissioner had prepared a list of
depressed classes, but this appeared to be rather arbitrary, since he had not laid down any definition
or criteria for the guidance of provincial superintendents. The Lothian Committee instead decided to
draw upon a note written by Dr. Hutton, the Census Commissioner of the 1931 census, who had
described his procedure. For this census, the Government of India had expressed its desire for
information conducive to a better knowledge of the backward and depressed classes and of the
problem involved in their present and future welfare. Therefore, the commissioner had given the
following instructions to the various Superintendents of Census Operations in India:
For this purpose it will be necessary to have a list of castes to be included in depressed classes
and all provinces are asked to frame a list applicable to the province. There are very great
difficulties in framing a list of this kind and there are insuperable difficulties in framing a list
of depressed classes which will be applicable to India as a whole. I have explained depressed

14

castes as castes, contact with whom entails purification on the part of high caste Hindus. It is
not intended that the term should have any reference to occupation as such but to those castes
which by reason of their traditional position in Hindu society are denied access to temples for
instance, or have to use separate wells or are not allowed to sit inside a school house but have
to remain outside or which suffer similar social disabilities.
Then followed a remark that would turn up again and again, namely that these disabilities vary in
different parts of India. Still, the Commissioner was optimistic: At the same time the castes which
belong to this class are generally known and can in most parts of India be listed for a definite area,
though perhaps the lists for India as a whole will not coincide (pp. 114-5). Yet, the problems would
come back whenever colonial officials had to prepare the lists of these groups in particular provinces:
No specific definition of depressed castes was framed and no more precise instructions were
issued to the Superintendents of Census Operations because it was realised that conditions
varied so much from province to province and from district to district, even within some
provinces that it would be unwise to tie down the Superintendents of Census Operations with
too meticulous instructions. The general method of proceeding prescribed was that of local
enquiry into what castes were held to be depressed and why, and the framing of a list
accordingly.
While reviewing the different regions of India, the Committee said that there was consensus in some
regions on the distinction between the depressed and other classes of the Hindu community, but
admitted that there were huge difficulties in other regions. In the United Provinces, for instance, there
was tremendous disagreement as to which groups should be considered depressed (pp. 116-8).
Different officials applied different criteria and the resulting lists were also very different.
Going by the actual statements made by the officials, even the so-called agreement on the
question of identifying the depressed classes in certain provinces was dubious. In a Minute on the
depressed classes dated 12th March 1932, Mr. M.B. Mullick, a Member of the Bengal Provincial
Franchise Committee, started by giving indications of Hindu topography. The term Hindu, he
wrote, does not indicate any homogenous race and the various castes coming under the term have
hardly anything in common between one and another, except that they all profess the Hindu religion
and are governed by Hindu laws:
It is therefore impossible to try to find out any community of interest between these various
castes. But even with various differences, there are certain castes which can be grouped

15

together in consideration of their enjoyment of political and social privileges in common with
one another. For instance, the three topmost castes under the Hindu topography, namely, the
Brahmin, the Vaidya, and the Kayastha, practically go together; and though there is no
intermarriage between the three castes and even amongst the several sub-sects of each of
them, they enjoy all other privileges, social and political, together in that they have the
common social servants, the priest and the barber, to serve them, and in matters of education
and state patronage they have jointly got the largest share in between themselves. (p. 251)
These three he called Caste-Hindus and he said: It is almost an admitted fact that the said three
castes have so far determined the hierarchy of various Hindu castes on account of their privileged
position and that they have always exercise a very great influence upon the ruling authorities of the
country. Note how an apparent certainty about the identification of these Caste-Hindus goes hand
in hand with language use that expresses uncertainty and doubt: there are certain castes which can be
grouped together and it is almost an admitted fact that these have determined the hierarchy.
Things got worse when Mullick moved to his next question: Depressed classesWho they are
(p. 252, 3). There has been no attempt made so far, he said, to define the term depressed class.
I am also obliged to concede that it is not quite possible to give a cut and dry definition of the term.
There cannot be a correct definition, Mullick concluded. Still, one could refer to the above classification
of Caste-Hindus to see that looking at the events as have happened certain indications can surely
be given of the castes who would come under the depressed classes. Then followed the typical
indications: it concerned castes from whose hands the Caste Hindus could not accept water or whose
presence in the kitchen would be considered polluting, castes not allowed into any public temple,
castes not allowed to enter dining rooms or hotels run by the Caste Hindus, etc. The terms
untouchability and unapproachability had often been used to refer to these indications. But the use
of these terms had caused some confusion as being the only defining factors of the depressed
classes. It is not the same consideration, Mullick said, that would make a particular caste a depressed
class in all the different parts of India; the factors differ in different provinces. What then was the
common property that made these castes into depressed classes? Mullick again:
But the common indication remains, namely, that it is the external expression of an internal
feeling of odium by which certain sections of the community are precluded from having
anything in common with others in social matters and as a result of which, they are also
debarred from the enjoyment of their political rights. (pp. 252-3)

16

This one common factor of internal odium is expressed in a variety of practices, different in different
parts of India, which all lead to show that these castes are refused enjoyment of their political rights.
In spite of his problem of distinguishing Depressed Classes according to any property or set of
properties by which they can be recognized, Mullick then goes on to say which castes should be
counted in for Bengal. Of course, internal odium that expresses itself externally is not a very clear
property to identify a class of people and neither is the refusal of political rights. In the colonial India
of the 1930s, many if not most groups of people were subject to both such internal odium and the
refusal of political rights by the British rulers. Yet, these groups were clearly not all classified as
depressed classes.
What is striking is that the demand for some kind of empirical criteria came only whenever
colonial institutions had to practically decide which groups in which region of India should count as
Depressed Classes or Scheduled Castes. But the existence of such a distinct set of castes appeared to
be considered self-evident and not something that needed to be established before framing the relevant
lists and laws. More accurately, the British colonial bodies continuously wavered between two stances:
on the one hand, they considered the depressed classes a grouping purely for administrative
purposes and therefore one needed some kind of indicators to include or exclude groups of people
from this classification. Here, the problem of finding the common empirical properties that defined
these groups kept coming back again and again. On the other hand, the British shared some
presupposition that there was a distinct class of people among the Hindus who had been victims of
injustice and oppression for centuries. And here, there seemed to be a certainty that such a class
existed, which did not require any empirical evidence or further proof.
When it came back to the question of enfranchisement and its recommendation that there
should be separate electorates for the depressed classes, the Lothian Committee gave expression to
both stances in one sentence: Though there is wide difference of opinion in some provinces regarding
the castes which should be classified as depressed, there is no dispute that the depressed classes
constitute a substantial portion of the population of India as a whole. They made it amply clear that
they did not mean by this that the largest part of the population was very poor. No: As untouchability
is a social or religious and not an economic test a considerable number of the depressed classes will
find their way on to the electoral roll, for in some provinces numbers of them are both prosperous and
well educated (p. 124, 301-302). The Depressed Classes now fell together with the Untouchables,
a group defined by the social or religious criterion of untouchability.

17

Since everything now hinged on the claims about a group called the Untouchables and the
criterion of untouchability, it is of supreme importance to find out the empirical and conceptual
foundations for postulating the existence of such a group, category or community in the structures of
Indian society. Once again, we need to travel some decades further back in time to find out how this
distinction between castes had originated.

3. The Invention of the Untouchables

From the 1930s, the so-called division of the Hindus between touchables and untouchables was
presented as though it was an age-old split made by Hinduism and its followers. The same goes for
the idea that untouchability was the common factor that explained certain kinds of behaviour and
actions in Indian society and which divided one set of castes from another set of castes. Indian political
leaders also wrote and talked in this way. The most important debate on the issue of caste and
untouchability was that between Dr. B.R. Ambedkar and Mahatma Gandhi. Generally, this is viewed
as a clash between a social reformer and untouchable leader, who wanted to rid Indian society of the
Hindu caste system, and a Hindu apologist who defended the varna system but rejected untouchability
as an unfortunate blot on Hinduism.
However, if we look beyond this disagreement, we find fundamental agreement in the basic
ideas about caste shared by Ambedkar and Gandhi. Once again, one of these ideas was that the caste
system divided the Hindus into two distinct classes: Caste Hindus and untouchables in the words
of Ambedkar; Savarnas and Harijans, in the terminology preferred by Gandhi. Both to Ambedkar
and Gandhi, the claim that Hinduism had discriminated between these two sets of castes seemed a
self-evident truth. Its self-evidence was constituted by the fact that the Hindus had instituted a practice
and property called untouchability. According to Ambedkar, Hinduism as a religion was responsible
for this, since it regarded the caste system as a divinely sanctioned institution and prescribed caste
discrimination as a religious obligation. According to Gandhi, the Hindu varna system had its virtue,
but treating certain people as untouchables was a corruption that now needed to be removed. This had
to happen through the conversion or transformation of the Savarna Hindus, he said.
Was the distinction between Caste Hindus and Untouchables really an age-old division within
Hinduism? No, it was not. In fact, as Simon Charsley argues in his interesting article Untouchable:
What is in a Name (1996), the Untouchables and Untouchability had been invented by the British

18

colonial administration in the first two decades of the twentieth century. It had emerged in the course
of the entire caste census exercise.2 To understand this, we need to take one more step back.
In the course of the nineteenth century, European orientalists had developed the idea that the
structure of Indian society was determined by a fourfold caste hierarchy, which was sanctioned by the
Hindu religion. Evidence for this they claimed to have found in texts like the Purushukta hymn from
the Rig Veda and the Maanavadharmashastra. However, British colonial officials soon discovered that,
empirically, the structure of Indian society did (and does) not reflect any such fourfold caste hierarchy.
In fact, they came to this conclusion when they launched a caste census aimed at classifying the many
jtis along the lines of the vara hierarchy. Some tried to place each jti into one of the vara categories;
others stipulated a larger number of categories for the classification of castes; yet others devised
complex schemes that arranged groups and sub-groups in terms of some principle of classification of
castes. But, as these British administrators often admitted, this excercise merely mirrored the
classificatory scheme they decided to use and not the structures of Indian society.3 For most jtis, it
turned out to be impossible to attribute a stable location in the hierarchy. Even worse, it was often
impossible to find out to what caste Indians belonged. When asked the question What is your
caste?, officials complained, some Hindus would mention one of the four varas, others would say
they belonged to some endogamous sub-caste, yet others would mention some caste-title or add
vague and indefinite entries. In short, the Hindus seemed to be ignorant of their own caste system.4
In this dubious context of the caste census, the idea that there was a distinct class of Hindus
called the Untouchables crystallized. Charsley reveals some of the historical steps in this process. Sir
Herbert Risley became Census commissioner for the 1901 Census in India. His procedure was to
send to every Census Commissioner, in each province, presidency, princely state, and so forth, a
standard scheme, inviting them to set up committees of native gentlemen to consider its local
applicability and to propose modifications as required. As a part of his standard scheme, he included

Simon Charsley, Untouchable: What is in a Name?, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 2, no.
1 (1996), pp. 1-23.
2

For a striking example, see John C. NESFIELD, Brief View of the Caste System of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh,
together with an examination of the names and figures shown in the census report, 1882, Allahabad 1885, which the author
presented as an attempt to classify on a functional basis all the main castes of the United Provinces, and to
explain their gradations of rank and the process of their formation.
3

See Sir Edward A.H. BLUNT, The Caste System of North India, with special reference to the United Provinces of Agra and
Oudh, Madras, Oxford University Press 1931, pp. 8-9; Nicholas B. DIRKS, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making
of Modern India, Delhi, Permanent Black, 2002, pp. 49, 202-212; J. Strachey, India, pp. 328-330.
4

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four Sanskrit-named Shudra categories, of which the last was Asprishya Shudra, glossed as castes
whose touch is so impure as to pollute even Ganges water (p. 1). As had always happened in the caste
censuses, Risleys general scheme failed. The committees and commissioners came up with a wide
variety of schemes and often fell back to greater or lesser extent on alphabetical lists. Risleys
category of notto-be touched Shudra did not prove to be useful. His major criterion of Brahmins
willingness to take water turned out to be irrelevant in many regions. Yet, he took the two reports
from Rajasthan as a (very thin) basis to create a unified classification including a Class VII: Castes
untouchable. As Charsley puts it: From this unpropitious start, representing as it did more of a
rebuff than a successful initiative, the career of a key term in modern India was launched (pp. 2-3).
The idea also existed among the British that the Indian caste system consisted of the four
varnas and a fifth section. But this alternative scheme had also not worked to empirically classify the
jatis in the Southern parts of India. Yet the 1871 Census had still adopted the four-plus-one version
of the varnas and accepted without question that it represented the divisions of the Hindu
community. The fifth was labelled out-castes or the Pariah, or Out-Caste, Tribes. The term Pariah
was now used to describe that great division of the people, spoken of by themselves as the fifth
caste (Cornish 1874, cited in Charsley, p. 5). Thus, twentieth-century official colonial discourse used
varna as a scheme of classification but with contention as to whether it was to be in the four or fourplus-one form. In the first decades of the twentieth century, this scheme was then elaborated with
the Untouchables as the name that referred to the fifth group or to a sub-section of the Shudras.
We need not go further into the career of the terms Untouchables and Untouchability to
see what has happened: these were classificatory terms that had been introduced by a particular
colonial official. Yet, they must have made minimal sense to this official and (at least some of) his
colleagues. The sense and significance of this classification depended on the experiential and
conceptual framework that formed the background to the reasoning of the British and other
Europeans. Of course, the question now is why and how this framework impelled them to create this
particular type of distinction between caste groups.
Whatever may be the answer, the terms Untouchables and Untouchability had no
empirically and conceptually sound reference to a community or grouping existing in Indian society.
Still, the terms came to be used as though they pointed to common empirical properties that could be
used to distinguish a particular community (or set of communities) in this society, which deserved
certain privileges because of its depressed status. This newly invented scheme to make sense of Indian
society had five distinctive features, Charsley points out: it established an all-India standard; it

20

subsumed individual castes; it dichotomized society; it gave priority to one particular form of
disadvantage; and it characterized the disadvantaged negatively, as victims only (p. 9). This is the
scheme that constituted the caste laws of twentieth-century India, from the caste reservation system
to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Atrocities Act. It is the same scheme that gave rise to
the Ambedkarite Movement of recent times.

4. Conclusion
What we can now conclude is that the idea that there were two distinct communities or communities
of communities in Indian society, namely Caste Hindus and Depressed Classes (or Untouchables or
Scheduled Castes or Harijans or Dalits) did not correspond to any empirically retrievable structure in
this society. There never were coherent common properties that allowed people to recognize these as
two distinct communities across India. Thus, no research or investigation could ever show that these
two existed as communities in the social world of India. As Charsley points out: There is no question
of individual jaatis being submerged into a single Untouchable caste, any more than there is of a new
unified identity of caste Hindu. Only studies which, for the sake of political correctness, merge jaatis
under a single label, either Scheduled Caste, Harijan or Dalit, fail to show this (p. 17).
We cannot fully unearth the conceptual foundations of the opposition between Caste Hindus
and Depressed Classes without dissecting a centuries-old European Orientalist account about India.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth century, European scholars, missionaries and colonial officials
had developed a standard account about Hinduism and its caste system. By the early twentieth
century, this account had achieved the status of a factual description of Indian culture and society. Yet,
if we look at the conceptual building blocks that form the core of this account, these cannot be
understood without the Christian-theological framework that guided the Europeans in their reasoning
about India. For centuries, it had been obvious to the Christian Europeans that Hinduism was a false
religion and that the caste system was the evil social structure it had instituted. Against the
background of this theological framework, they looked for the victims of the corrupt Hindu religion,
the lowest of the low, who would obviously want to escape from its grips. These victims they claimed
to have found in a group they alternately called the Untouchables, the outcastes, the Depressed
Classes or later the Scheduled Castes.

21

In other words, the British (and larger Western) cultural experience of Indian society
crystallized within a background framework constituted by Protestant-Christian theological ideas
about false religion, which had been secularized and thus gradually shaped the common sense of
European scholars and laymen. Within this framework, the British invented a social distinction
between two groups or communities of castes, which was indeed present in their experiential world
but not in Indian society. Through their caste policies and censuses, they spread the idea that Hindu
society was characterized by the opposition between Caste Hindus and Untouchables or Depressed
Classes. Thus, in spite of the recurring discovery that this imaginary distinction did not correspond to
the empirical structure of Indian society, it could not but have its effects in a society under colonial
rule. The crucial step came in the Government of India Act of 1935 and its caste schedules. Eventually,
the Government of India (Scheduled Castes) Order of 1936 ordered that the castes, races or tribes,
or parts of or groups within castes, races or tribes specified in Parts I to IX of the Schedule to this
Order shall, in the Provinces to which those Parts respectively relate, be deemed to be scheduled castes
so far as regards members thereof resident in the localities specified in relation to them respectively
in those Parts of that Schedule.
Strikingly, the Indian leaders and intellectuals of the postcolonial period not only swallowed
the colonial account of Hinduism and the caste system hook, line, and sinker, but also accepted the
social divisions it created among the people of India. It is as though they felt compelled to transform
the imaginary distinctions of the British colonial account into existing social structures in India. The
Kings Excellent Majesty, Edward VIII, had ordered how the people of India should be divided into
Scheduled Castes and others. After 1947, the Indian political and intellectual elites aimed to enforce
this royal decree in post-Independence India and tried to rebuild Indian society along the lines of the
colonial model. This is the mission that the caste legislation and the Ambedkarite movement of
contemporary India are continuing with great fervour unto this day.

22