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.
Ambedkar argues that Indian untouchables are historically these ‘broken men,’ i.e. outsiders attached to village communities for service and defense, residing outside the village from the beginning, but not initially regarded as ritually polluting.
The theory of the ‘broken men’ is Ambedkar’s most original contribution, and the one that has generated the most historical discussion. In the tribal society that preceded the settled village order of ancient India, war between tribes was endemic. When a tribe was defeated, it did not necessarily disappear. Fragments of it, unable to return to their homeland, unable to reconstitute themselves as an independent unit, would attach themselves to the winning tribe, living near its settlement, performing marginal but necessary functions. Crucially, they retained their own tribal identity, their own totems, their own customs. They were not absorbed but attached, and that attachment was expressed spatially in the settlement outside the village wall.
Part III of the book demolishes the two established theories of untouchability’s origin. The racial theory, that untouchables are descended from a conquered, racially inferior group, was popular among colonial scholars and has traces in some Hindu nationalist thought as well. Ambedkar dismantles it noting that no racial difference between Hindus and untouchables can be consistently identified. Hence, that theory explains nothing and is supported by nothing except the assumption that a social hierarchy must rest on a natural hierarchy.
The occupational theory, that Untouchables became untouchable because of the degraded nature of their traditional occupations such as handling corpses, skinning animals, cleaning streets, fares no better. Ambedkar asks logically: which came first, the occupation or the stigma? If certain people were assigned degraded occupations because they were already considered untouchable, then the occupation is not the cause of untouchability but its consequence. And the historical record, he argues, supports this reading. The ‘broken men’ who lived outside the village were not originally tanners or scavengers, but became associated with these occupations because that was what was available to them once the stigma had been applied as the main body of economic and social life was closed to them. Occupation, therefore, is downstream of untouchability, not its source.
Parts IV and V carry the book’s two core arguments. Buddhism’s clash with the resurgence of Brahminism and beef-eating are the two roots of untouchability, and the logic connecting them deserves more attention than it usually receives.
Ambedkar examines the 1910 Census which classified Hindus apart from the ‘Depressed Classes’, tracing this distinction to historical conflicts between Brahminism and Buddhism. He notes Buddhism’s widespread influence in India from the 3rd century BCE to the 7th century CE, supported by rulers and religious institutions. However, as Brahminism regained prominence, it exhibited systematic hostility towards Buddhists, as documented in Brahminic texts that denigrated Buddhists and stripped them of ritual status. For instance, quotes from Manu and Apararka highlight the purification rituals needed after contact with Buddhists. Ambedkar asserts that this hostility was deliberate, targeting those who remained Buddhist when Brahmanism reasserted itself, leading to the emergence of the untouchable communities, which he argues were initially formed by those embracing Buddhist identity.
On beef-eating, Ambedkar’s claim is not simply that Brahmins disliked beef-eaters. There is evidence in Vedic literature that beef-eating was practiced in early Aryan society, including by Brahmins. The cow was not always sacred. What changed? Ambedkar argues that the competitive dynamic between Brahminism and Buddhism drove the transformation. Buddhism had built a substantial following among peasants and agricultural communities partly through its teaching of non-violence, ahimsa, which extended to cattle. Killing and eating cows was not merely impure; it was a form of violence against living beings. Brahminism, competing for the same popular base, adopted the same position not from its own internal logic but as a competitive response. The cow became sacred, and beef-eating became taboo as part of a broader religious competition for the loyalty of agricultural communities.
This left the ‘broken men’ in an impossible position. They were poor. They lived outside the village. They had little access to other protein sources. They had been eating the carcasses of dead cattle, which cost them nothing and was available to them for generations. When the cow became sacred, this practice became not merely unusual but transgressive. The ’broken men’, continuing to eat beef out of economic necessity, became the visible embodiment of everything the reconsolidated Brahminic order had defined as impure, heretical, and intolerable.
What is especially important here is the sequence. Ambedkar argues that a specific historical transformation, i.e. the sacralization of the cow in a specific competitive religious context, turned an existing practice of marginal communities into the visible marker of their permanent exclusion. Untouchability is the product of a policy. The policy had authors and the suffering it produced was not the unintended consequence of divine law, but the foreseeable result of human decisions taken in the interests of a class.
Part VI of the book addresses what might seem like a narrow scholarly question: when exactly did untouchability emerge? Ambedkar argues that the ‘Impure’, as a category, can be traced to the Dharma Sutras, which date from roughly 600-300 BCE. But the untouchables, as a distinct and specific social category, came into existence much later after 400 CE. This dating matters because it destroys the claim that untouchability is ancient and therefore somehow natural or inevitable. It is, in historical terms, relatively recent. It has a beginning. It was not always there. And what was not always there need not always be there.
This argument also resolves what might otherwise seem like a puzzle: how did the ‘broken men’ live outside the village for centuries before being branded as untouchable? Ambedkar’s answer is that the separation preceded the stigma. The ’broken men’ were outsiders – economically marginal, tribally alien, religiously different. But they were not yet ontologically polluting. That transformation – the conversion of social marginality into permanent, hereditary, total defilement – required the specific ideological conjuncture of post-400 CE India: the full consolidation of Brahminic power after the decline of Buddhism, the completion of the sacralization of the cow, and the hardening of the purity-pollution framework into a system that left no exit.
Conclusion
Ambedkar concludes that untouchability is not an ancient, natural outgrowth of Hindu notions of purity, nor a timeless racial or occupational fact. It is a historically contingent product of social evolution, ideological struggle, and economic change. There is no racial difference between caste Hindus and untouchables, and no occupation is intrinsically untouchable; what converts certain ‘broken men’ communities into untouchables is a complex conjuncture: their original status as alien dependants, their allegiance to Buddhism against Brahmanism, and their continued beef-eating in an environment where the cow has become sacred and vegetarianism a marker of purity.
The permanence, heritability and territorial segregation of untouchability i.e. “once impure, always impure,” enforced by ghettos and a cordon sanitaire around entire communities make it, in Ambedkar’s view, a uniquely vicious institution in world history, worse than any earlier or parallel form of pollution. The book is therefore not only a positive historical reconstruction but also an indictment of Hindu civilization’s failure to examine, let alone atone for, the existence of such a system.
Methodologically, Ambedkar is explicit about the difficulties of working with incomplete evidence and missing links; he defends an approach that combines scattered textual and ethnographic data, comparative historical analogies, and a disciplined use of intuition and hypothesis. By doing so, he both challenges Brahmin scholars’ “conspiracy of silence” around caste and offers Dalit politics and Indian constitutionalism a genealogy of untouchability that exposes its contingent, man-made character and thereby opens it to radical critique and abolition.
