It had no allusions to personal experiences and was free of opinions. It was an 18-page paper that contained a pure, detached academic study of the nature of the caste system in India. His paper was titled “Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development”. Ambedkar was then 25 years old and a doctoral student of Anthropology. Ambedkar made a novel attempt to explain the caste system in India in a paper he read at an Anthropology seminar that Alexander Goldenweizer (1880-1940) organized in Columbia University.

Ambedkar launched a movement at the Kalaram temple, Nashik, in 1930 to demand temple entry rights for DalitsĪs early as 1916, B.R.

Ambedkar remained an “Untouchable” in the brahmanical and European scholarly discourses on caste in India. None of Indian or Western anthropologists or other social scientists valued B.R. Ambedkar! Ambedkar was treated only as a leader of the Dalits and one of the makers of the Constitution but social scientists working on India did not give him the status of a scholar in their elite discourses.

Srinivas, Surajit Sinha, André Béteille, Rajni Kothari, Mckim Marriott, Ronald Inden, Bernard Cohn, Nicholas Dirks and Romila Thapar but not about B.R. Kosambi, Nirmal Kumar Bose, Ramkrishna Mukherjee, M.N. The students of Anthropology, Sociology, History and Political Science in the Indian universities have to know a lot about Louis Dumont, H.H. Ambedkar still does not figure in Indian Anthropology. Ambedkar (1891-1956), who was not only a scholar but also one of the greatest legislators and policymakers of independent India.Īmbedkar’s views on caste were also overlooked in the anthropology and sociology curricula in Indian universities. But what was most interesting in these discourses is the absence of the contributions of one of the most original thinkers on caste system in India, Dr B.R. The Marxist scholars viewed caste system as a kind of class formation. Srinivas propounded a theory of social mobility occurring within the caste system through a process that he termed “Sanskritization”. On the other hand, anti-Dumont interactionist scholars like Mckim Marriott gave more emphasis to the local and regional variations in the caste hierarchy and M.N. Louis Dumont (1911-1998), for example, in his famous book Homo Hierachicus (1966) championed this cultural notion of hierarchy to analyze caste system in structuralist terms. Western sociologists and anthropologists have largely viewed India as a society characterized by caste in which social hierarchy was translated into a biological, and hence cultural, idiom. ‘To conclude, while I am ambitious to advance a Theory of Caste, if it can be shown to be untenable I shall be equally willing to give it up.’

The Untouchables by B.R. Ambedkar