Theoretical Perspectives on Dalits of India: From Mythology and Gandhi to Ambedkar’s Broken Men Theory

Ask five scholars why untouchability exists in India, and you will likely get five different answers. Some point to ancient religious ideas about purity. Others see a straightforward story of economic exploitation. Ambedkar traced it to a specific historical event involving defeated tribes. And Dalit communities themselves often tell an entirely different story, rooted in their own myths and sacred lineages. None of these explanations cancels out the others. Together, they show how a single social reality can be read through very different theoretical lenses, each shaped by the discipline, politics, and moment in history that produced it.

The stories Dalit communities tell about themselves 🔗

Long before sociologists and anthropologists began theorising about caste, Dalit communities were already explaining their own position in the social order through myths of descent. These are not simply folk tales; they are living traditions that give communities dignity, a sacred origin, and a sense of continuity that resists the shame imposed from outside.

The Matangis of Maharashtra, for instance, trace their lineage to the sage Matang Rishi, connecting their identity to a figure of ascetic power rather than social degradation. Among the Parayar of Tamil Nadu, origin stories are woven around the sage Jamadagni and his wife Renuka; in one widely told version, an outcaste woman intervenes to save Renuka’s life, and this act of courage becomes the foundation of the community’s own goddess tradition and spiritual authority, as studies of Paraiyar mythology describe. The Madiga of Andhra Pradesh similarly trace their descent to Jambava Muni, a primeval sage figure, positioning their community’s origin at the very beginning of creation rather than at its margins, a lineage explored in research on Madiga ritual traditions.

What unites these stories is that they refuse the idea that untouchability is natural or eternal. Instead, they locate the community’s worth in sacred ancestry, turning a socially imposed stigma into a claim of spiritual descent. This self-narrated tradition matters as much as any academic theory, because it shows how communities have always contested their assigned place in the hierarchy, long before the vocabulary of “caste theory” existed.

Gandhi’s varna vision and the jajmani village economy 🔗

Gandhi: varna without hierarchy 🔗

Mahatma Gandhi offered one of the more optimistic readings of the traditional social order. He argued that the four varnas were never meant to be ranked one above another; each was simply a different occupational role, equally necessary and equally honourable. A scavenger’s labour, in his view, held the same spiritual worth as a priest’s. Gandhi rejected outright the idea that varna implied a hierarchy of pure and impure groups, insisting instead that the varnas were meant to sit side by side rather than one above the other. He called the so-called untouchables Harijans, or children of God, and worked to end the practice of untouchability through moral reform within Hindu society rather than through the abolition of the varna framework itself.

This view was not without its critics. Ambedkar, among others, argued that Gandhi’s idealised varna system bore little resemblance to the caste hierarchy as it was actually lived and enforced. Still, Gandhi’s framing remains influential in debates about whether reform can happen from within a tradition or requires its complete rejection.

Wiser’s jajmani system: interdependence, not exploitation 🔗

Around the same period, the American anthropologist William Wiser was documenting how caste actually functioned in day-to-day village life in Uttar Pradesh. His concept of the jajmani system described a web of hereditary service relationships: landowning patron families, or jajmans, received services such as priestly rituals, carpentry, or laundry from specific service castes, who in turn received a fixed share of the harvest rather than cash wages. This arrangement was meant to continue across generations, tying different castes together through mutual obligation rather than open exchange.

Wiser’s account leaned toward a structural-functionalist reading of caste, treating the village as a self-sufficient, interdependent whole where every caste played a necessary role. Later scholars pushed back on this rosy picture, pointing out that the jajmani system also locked service castes into hereditary, often underpaid labour with little room for mobility. Even so, Wiser’s framework remains a starting point for understanding how caste organised the rural economy, not just religious belief.

Louis Dumont and the logic of purity and pollution 🔗

Where Gandhi and Wiser saw functional cooperation, the French anthropologist Louis Dumont saw something closer to religious ideology. In his influential work on the Indian caste system, Dumont argued that caste could not be understood through Western ideas of economic class or social stratification at all. Instead, he proposed that the entire system rests on one organising principle: the opposition between purity and pollution. Brahmins occupy the top of the hierarchy because they are considered ritually pure, while untouchables occupy the bottom because their traditional occupations bring them into contact with what Hindu tradition treats as polluting substances, such as death, waste, or animal remains. This purity-based ranking extends beyond people to occupations, foods, and even materials, creating a hierarchy that is fundamentally religious rather than economic in origin.

Michael Moffatt: consensus, not rejection 🔗

American anthropologist Michael Moffatt extended Dumont’s argument in an unexpected direction. Based on extensive fieldwork with Dalit communities in Tamil Nadu, Moffatt found that Dalits did not reject the hierarchical logic of caste even though they were its biggest victims. Instead, they recreated the same ranked structures within their own communities, complete with internal sub-castes and notions of relative purity. Moffatt read this as evidence that Dumont’s purity-pollution framework had wide cultural consensus, even among those it placed at the very bottom. Critics have questioned whether this “consensus” reflects genuine belief or simply the limited options available to a marginalised community, but the debate itself shows how central the purity-pollution model became to caste studies.

Seeing caste through a Marxist lens 🔗

Marxist scholars have approached the same question from a very different angle, treating caste less as a religious system and more as a form of economic exploitation dressed in ritual language. In this reading, the caste hierarchy that took shape in medieval India functioned much like European feudalism: upper castes controlled land and resources, while Dalits and other lower castes supplied labour with little control over their own conditions or earnings.

The scholar-activist Gail Omvedt developed this argument in detail across decades of research. She described the pre-colonial social order as a caste-structured form of feudalism, in which twice-born and other high castes acted as landlords and merchants while cultivators, artisans, and Dalit labourers were the exploited toilers who kept the system running. For Omvedt, understanding caste required combining Marxist attention to material exploitation with a serious engagement with caste itself, rather than treating caste as a mere cultural surface over an underlying class struggle. Her work helped bring Dalit history into conversation with broader debates on labour, land, and agrarian inequality in India.

Ambedkar’s theory of the Broken Men 🔗

Dr B. R. Ambedkar took a historical rather than purely religious or economic approach. Rather than accepting that untouchability was an ancient, unchanging feature of Hindu society, he set out to explain how it actually came into being. His answer centred on what he called “broken men”: groups from tribes defeated in ancient inter-tribal conflict, who lost their own communities and were forced to attach themselves to already-settled agricultural villages in exchange for labour, guard duty, and basic protection.

Because these broken men belonged to a different tribe than the settled villagers, they were kept at a distance from the start, typically living just outside the main village boundary. Over time, this outsider status hardened into permanent stigma, reinforced by two further developments Ambedkar identified: the broken men’s association with Buddhism at a time when Brahmanism was reasserting itself, and their continued consumption of beef even after cattle became sacred to the wider Hindu community. Ambedkar’s account deliberately set aside both religious myth and simple occupational explanations, arguing instead for a historically specific chain of events that turned a distinct but ordinary tribal group into a permanently excluded caste. This theory remains one of the most detailed attempts to explain untouchability as a product of history rather than an unchanging fact of nature.

Caste as race, caste as ethnicity 🔗

Berreman: caste discrimination as racial discrimination 🔗

American anthropologist Gerald Berreman brought a comparative lens to the discussion, drawing direct parallels between the treatment of untouchables in India and the treatment of Black Americans under segregation in the southern United States. Berreman argued that despite obvious differences in content, both systems operated in remarkably similar ways, with low-caste and low-status individuals resenting their position just as strongly in each context. His comparison was controversial, since caste in India is not organised around skin colour the way race is in the United States, but it opened up a lasting conversation about whether caste should be studied as a uniquely Indian phenomenon or as one example of a broader pattern of birth-based social exclusion found across cultures.

Jaffrelot: from sanskritisation to ethnic-political assertion 🔗

French political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot examined how Dalit strategies for social mobility have shifted over time. Earlier generations often pursued sanskritisation, adopting the customs and rituals of upper castes in the hope of gradually rising within the existing hierarchy. Jaffrelot traced a shift away from this approach toward ethnicisation, where Dalits increasingly assert a distinct political and cultural identity rather than trying to imitate upper-caste norms. This shift is visible in the rise of assertive Dalit political movements and parties that emphasise pride in a separate identity, drawing inspiration from figures like Ambedkar rather than seeking acceptance within the existing hierarchy.

Deepa Reddy: caste travels abroad as ethnicity 🔗

Anthropologist Deepa Reddy extended this line of thinking to the Indian diaspora. Studying Indian immigrant communities in the United States, she examined how caste identity, difficult to enforce through village-style social control in a new country, often gets reframed in terms borrowed from Western ideas of ethnicity. Reddy’s work on the ethnicity of caste has been widely cited in discussions of how caste identity is reframed and even raised within international human rights forums. Her research suggests that caste does not simply disappear when communities migrate; instead, it gets translated into a new vocabulary that fits the social categories of the host country, allowing it to persist in altered form far from the Indian villages where it originated.

What do you think? Do these different theories compete with each other, or do they simply capture different layers of the same reality? And when a community’s own origin myths conflict with an outside scholar’s historical explanation, whose account should carry more weight in how we understand caste today?

References

1. https://www.religion-online.org/article/paraiyars-ellaiyamman-as-an-iconic-symbol-of-collective-resistance-and-emancipatory-mythography/
2. http://junikhyatjournal.in/no_1_Online_21/126.pdf
3. https://www.britannica.com/topic/varna-Hinduism
4. https://www.britannica.com/topic/jajmani-system
5. https://www.britannica.com/topic/caste-social-differentiation
6. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691631394/an-untouchable-community-in-south-india
7. https://www.epw.in/engage/article/striving-begumpura-traversing-intellectual
8. https://m.thewire.in/article/books/untouchability-historical-evidence-beef-brahmins-broken-men
9. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/222839
10. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/students/modules/archive/hi297/lectureandseminartimetable/seminar6/jaffrelot_-_sanskritization_v_ethnicization_in_india.pdf
11. https://aogaku-daku.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/casteIDENTITY.pdf