“Before the Constitution: How ‘Scheduled Caste’ Was Born a Hindu Category — And Why the British Kept It That Way Part 1”, My Ind Makers, Aug 10, 2026.

“Introduction

Every argument about who is entitled to Scheduled Caste (SC) status in India today is, at bottom, an argument about history. Proponents of extending SC status to Dalit converts to Christianity and Islam often present the current religion-linked definition — Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists only — as a post-1950 anomaly, an accident of drafting that a more enlightened Republic ought to correct. The historical record says otherwise. The link between Scheduled Caste status and the Hindu social order was not invented by the Constituent Assembly in 1949. It was inherited, fully formed, from more than two decades of colonial administrative and political practice — practice that itself confronted, and rejected, the demand to extend caste-based protections to Christian and Muslim converts. This first article in the series traces that history.

Untouchability as an Administrative Fact, Not a Legal Category

Before “Scheduled Caste” existed as a term, the colonial state grappled with the reality of untouchability as a sociological fact peculiar to Hindu society. The 1881 census and subsequent decennial enumerations recorded a large population subjected to social disabilities on account of birth communities barred from temples, wells, schools, and public roads, and confined hereditarily to degrading occupations. British ethnographers and administrators, working through successive census operations, consistently identified this system of graded exclusion as an internal feature of Hindu social organisation, rooted in notions of ritual pollution that had no doctrinal counterpart in Islam or Christianity, notwithstanding that both faiths had, by then, acquired converts from the same untouchable communities.

This is the crucial starting point often erased from public memory: the British did not invent the idea that untouchability was a Hindu phenomenon. They found it that way, documented it that way, and built their entire administrative response around that understanding……………………..”

Read the full article at My Ind Makers.