Untouchability

There are many theories about the origin of caste and, subsequent to that, the origin of untouchable castes. The untouchable leader B. R. Ambedkar (1891–1956) held theories on both. He wrote that the caste system originated from the Brahman requirement of endogamy to preserve its purity and from that was spread to lower castes. Untouchables, he held, had been Buddhists isolated and despised when Brahmanism became dominant about the fourth century. His theory is important both because it led to his conversion to Buddhism and because it represents the need of all untouchables to explain their status. Most untouchable castes have a myth of origin usually relating to a cosmic mistake; almost none assume that a past karma of bad deeds has resulted in an untouchable status in this life. On the other hand, most caste Hindus think that sins or good deeds or the careful fulfillment of duty in a previous life produce the karma that determines the caste into which one is born.

Vivekananda Jha agrees on the time period of Ambedkar but disagrees with the idea of untouchables' Buddhist past, as do most caste Hindu writers. An influential book by Louis Dumont (1970) focuses exclusively on the concept of purity and pollution as determinants of the entire Hindu hierarchy. For Dumont, untouchables are necessary for the purity of Brahmans: "It is clear that the impurity of the Untouchable is conceptually inseparable from the purity of the Brahman.… In particular, untouchability will not truly disappear until the purity of the Brahman is itself radically devalued" (p. 54). Other theorists limit the role of purity and pollution, holding chiefly that the purity needed for ritual spread to other occasions in life. A Marxist approach presumes tribal groups coming into the caste system found a ranking dependent on their economic opportunities. Many inside and outside of India hold that race is behind caste distinctions, especially that of Brahman and untouchable, and this belief is reflected in many untouchable belief systems, such as the supposition that untouchables were indigenous people ruling the land, forced to submit to invading Aryans (people speaking an Indo-European language and coming from outside India). Whatever their beginnings, untouchable groups were clearly delineated by the seventh century, when the Chinese traveler Xuanzang listed butchers, fishermen, public performers, executioners, and scavengers as marked castes living outside the city.