FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1948, ‘The Untouchables: Who Were They and Why They Became Untouchables?’ is Ambedkar’s attempt to answer a question that had, as he says, never seriously been asked. Till 1948, nobody had subjected untouchability – a social condition afflicting fifty million people – to systematic historical inquiry. Ambedkar’s explanation for this absence is characteristically direct: the old orthodox Hindu does not think untouchability needs explanation because it is simply natural; the modern educated Hindu is too ashamed to investigate it publicly; and European students of social institutions have, inexplicably, ignored it entirely.The book he writes is therefore, as he puts it, “a pioneer attempt in the exploration of a field so completely neglected by everybody.”
The architecture of the argument
The book moves in six parts, and it is worth understanding the structure because it is not what readers accustomed to moral denunciations of caste might expect. Ambedkar, instead of beginning with outrage, begins with a comparative survey.
Part I asks: are the Hindus the only people in the world who practice untouchability? The answer is no. Primitive and ancient societies across the world recognized defilement through contact with corpses, through birth, through menstruation, through death. Defilement was a universal human phenomenon. But Hindu untouchability is categorically different from all of these. Pollution in primitive societies is occasional, ritualistic and removable. A person who has touched a corpse becomes impure and can be purified through specific rites. However, Hindu untouchability is permanent, hereditary, and total. It attaches not to an act but to a person, and from a person to all their descendants, all time. The ‘Untouchables’ are not those who have done something polluting; they are someone who are polluting, by the simple fact of their existence. This distinction – between temporary and permanent, between ritual and ontological defilement – is the analytical foundation on which the rest of the book rests.
Part II turns to the physical fact that defines the life of untouchables everywhere in India. They live outside the village in a separate settlement, with a separate well, barred from the spaces of ordinary Hindu social life. Ambedkar’s question is: how did this come about? Ambedkar rejects the idea that caste Hindus first declared certain groups untouchable and then, by some pan-Indian political operation, expelled them en masse to external hamlets. The more reasonable hypothesis is that the groups relegated as untouchables already lived outside the village. The stigma came later and was applied to a separation that already existed.
To explain why a class would originally live outside the village, Ambedkar reconstructs the evolution of primitive society from nomadic, cattle-owning tribes to settled agrarian communities. Early tribes are nomadic not from instinct but because their wealth, i.e. cattle, is migratory; incessant tribal wars over cattle, women, and grazing grounds constantly produce “broken men,” fragments of defeated tribes who are cut off from their kin group. In kin-based tribal organization, identity and protection are tied to membership in a particular tribe; a person without a tribe is homeless and exposed.
As some tribes settle on land, discovering agriculture and fixing wealth as land rather than cattle, they form village communities, while other tribes remain nomadic and prey on the settled groups. Settled tribes face a defense problem since they cannot be perpetually mobilized against raiders and ‘broken men’ face a shelter problem. Hence, a functional bargain arises where ‘broken men’ undertake tasks of watch and ward, menial services and marginal labour in exchange for food and protection from the settled community. Yet because they are alien in blood and because strategic defense is best organized at the periphery, their dwellings are located outside the core village.
