Gandhi’s Stance Against Caste Discrimination and Untouchability

Few social questions troubled Mahatma Gandhi as deeply as the twin evils of caste discrimination and untouchability. In a country where millions were denied basic dignity purely on account of their birth, Gandhi made the eradication of untouchability one of the most defining causes of his life. His views on this subject, however, were neither simple nor static. They evolved over decades – from an early, partial defense of the varna order to an eventual insistence that caste, in any oppressive form, had to go. Understanding Gandhi’s stance requires looking at both what he opposed and how he fought to change it.

The original varna system versus its degeneration 🔗

Gandhi’s starting point was a distinction between the ancient varna system and the caste system that India actually lived under. The Bhagavad Gita itself describes the four occupational categories as arising from people’s qualities (gunas) and actions (karma), not from birth. In its early conception, the system assigned intellectual and priestly roles to Brahmins, political and military authority to Kshatriyas, trade to Vaishyas, and labor to Shudras – but social mobility, in principle, was not entirely foreclosed.

Gandhi held that this original framework had been corrupted beyond recognition. By the time of British colonial rule, the varna system had transformed into a rigid hereditary caste hierarchy that imposed severe restrictions on lower groups and created an entire class of people deemed “untouchable” – outside the pale of society altogether. In Gandhi’s own words, recorded in his letters, he wrote that “varnashram is a lost treasure and there is utter confusion” – the original ideal had become unrecognizable in practice.

This distinction mattered deeply to Gandhi’s philosophy. He did not attack the varna ideal as inherently wrong; rather, he attacked what it had become: a system that ranked human beings by birth, denied entire communities their basic rights, and called it religion. For Gandhi, the varna system in its original form was based on one’s qualities and occupation rather than birth. Its degeneration into birth-based hierarchy was, for him, a betrayal of Hindu ideals – not their expression.

Untouchability as a “soul-destroying sin” 🔗

Gandhi reserved his sharpest condemnation for untouchability. He regarded it as categorically different from the caste system itself – not a matter of degree, but of kind. An untouchable, in the social reality Gandhi witnessed, was entirely outside respectable society and was hardly treated as a human being. Gandhi called it a blot on Hinduism and, in an October 1932 letter, declared plainly: “Untouchability is a soul-destroying sin. Caste is a social evil.”

Gandhi’s philosophy held that untouchability was not an inseparable part of the caste system but a contemptible abnormal outgrowth in Hindu social structure – one that spelled inequality and exploitation. He viewed it not merely as a social failing but as a spiritual one: living with untouchability, he once said, was like drinking from a cup of poison. He could not, he wrote in 1921, remain a Hindu if untouchability was truly a part of Hinduism.

Gandhi also coined the term Harijan – meaning “children of God” – as a way of asserting the equal spiritual worth of those who had been classified as untouchable. By using this name, Gandhi wanted to remove the social stigma attached to words like “untouchables” or “depressed classes” and highlight the equal dignity of all human beings. The term was later rejected by Dalit activists, including B.R. Ambedkar, who saw it as patronizing – a critique worth noting when assessing the limits of Gandhi’s approach.

Gandhi’s anti-caste campaigns: from moral pressure to organized action 🔗

Gandhi’s opposition to untouchability was not confined to words. He backed it with sustained, organized action across several decades. As early as 1905, Gandhi had held that Brahmins and untouchables were equal in his eyes, and he worked to destroy the notion that physical contact with untouchables “polluted” higher-caste Hindus.

His methods were characteristically rooted in moral persuasion rather than legal enforcement. Gandhi sought to change the hearts of high-caste Hindus through moral pressure, believing that lasting change had to come from within the conscience of the community. He launched newspapers – Harijan in English, Harijan-Sevak in Hindi, and Harijan Bandhu in Gujarati – to spread awareness against untouchability. He supported the Vaikom Satyagraha in Kerala, which demanded the right of untouchables to use roads near a temple. He lent his presence and voice to temple entry movements across the country.

Between 1933 and 1934, Gandhi conducted an intensive campaign against untouchability across India, traveling over 20,000 kilometers by train, car, bullock cart, and on foot. This Harijan tour was both a public education drive and a fund-raising effort for Dalit welfare programs. He also insisted on integrating anti-untouchability work into ashram life – in Gandhi’s ashrams, everyone, including Gandhi himself, cleaned toilets and performed manual labor, directly challenging the idea that certain kinds of work were degrading or impure.

The Harijan Sevak Sangh and the Poona Pact 🔗

One of the most consequential – and contested – moments in Gandhi’s anti-untouchability work was the episode of the Poona Pact of 1932. The British government’s Communal Award of that year had proposed separate electorates for the depressed classes, as demanded by B.R. Ambedkar. Gandhi opposed this fiercely, believing it would permanently divide Hindu society and isolate untouchables from the broader national body politic. He launched a fast unto death in Yerwada Jail on September 20, 1932.

The Poona Pact, reached in September 1932, was a significant milestone in the struggle for rights and representation for India’s untouchables. It replaced separate electorates with reserved seats within a joint electorate – more seats than the British had offered, but without the independent political platform that Ambedkar had sought. Ambedkar, under immense pressure, signed the pact. He later viewed it as a compromise that weakened Dalit political independence.

Immediately after the pact, Gandhi moved to institutionalize his anti-untouchability efforts. The Harijan Sevak Sangh, founded on September 30, 1932, was a non-profit organization established by Gandhi to eradicate untouchability in India. It worked to secure equal access to temples, schools, wells, and public roads for Dalits, supported inter-caste dining and marriages, and ran schools and hostels for Dalit children. It now has branches in 26 states across India. A powerful and autonomous anti-untouchability movement led by the Harijan Sevak Sangh played a crucial role in enhancing the institutional capabilities of Congress governments, enabling them to address the concerns of the Dalit community.

The evolution of Gandhi’s position: toward total rejection of caste 🔗

Gandhi’s views on caste were not fixed – they shifted significantly over time, and this matters when assessing his legacy. In his early years, Gandhi had partially defended the varna framework as a rational division of labor. But this position changed progressively.

On November 27, 1927, Gandhi openly declared that if the removal of untouchability required the varnashrama system to collapse entirely, he would not shed a single tear. By April 1933, he went further, asserting that varna could not be determined merely by birth because natural qualities and aptitudes, not heredity, were what counted. By 1935, Gandhi’s final position was that caste had to go – he titled a November 1935 article in Harijan “Caste Has To Go,” stating that the sooner public opinion abolished caste, the better.

By 1946, Gandhi had announced that in his Sevagram Ashram, couples could marry only on the condition that one party was a Harijan – a direct, practical endorsement of inter-caste marriage. His vision had moved from reforming caste from within to dismantling its social power altogether. As he told Jawaharlal Nehru: “If untouchability goes, the caste system goes.”

The Gandhi-Ambedkar debate: reform versus annihilation 🔗

No account of Gandhi’s views on caste would be complete without engaging with the profound challenge mounted by B.R. Ambedkar. Ambedkar, himself born into an untouchable community, argued that Gandhi’s approach did not go nearly far enough. In his 1945 publication What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables, Ambedkar mounted a detailed critique of Gandhi’s reform model, arguing that focusing on untouchability while leaving the varna structure in place was like treating a symptom while preserving the disease.

Ambedkar’s position was clear: untouchability was a byproduct of the caste system, and there would be outcasts for as long as there were castes. True emancipation required annihilating caste entirely – not reforming it from within. Gandhi publicly disagreed, maintaining that the caste system had limitations and defects, but there was nothing sinful about it as there was about untouchability.

This is where the debate remains genuinely unresolved. Gandhi believed he was attacking the root of caste oppression by targeting untouchability – its most extreme and violent expression. Critics, from Ambedkar onward, have argued that this strategy allowed the broader structure of caste to survive. Suhas Palshikar has argued that Gandhi was right to identify untouchability as the most abhorrent expression of caste inequality and attendant inhumanity, for it stood for everything ugly in the caste system, and therefore had to go instantly. But Ambedkar’s counter – that untouchability could not be removed without dismantling the hierarchy that generated it – has shaped Dalit politics and constitutional thought ever since.

Gandhi’s legacy in India’s constitutional and social framework 🔗

Despite the ongoing debate about its adequacy, Gandhi’s anti-untouchability work had measurable consequences. His campaigns brought the question of Dalit rights into the center of national political life at a time when it might have been ignored. His emphasis on the moral responsibility of upper-caste Hindus shifted some of the burden of reform onto those who had benefited from the system.

When India became independent, Ambedkar, as the architect of the Indian Constitution, ensured constitutional safeguards for equality and the abolition of untouchability – culminating in Article 17, which abolished untouchability and made its practice a punishable offense. The constitutional framework drew on both traditions: Gandhi’s moral campaigns had built public consciousness; Ambedkar’s structural approach ensured legal protection.

Gandhi’s insistence that “it has been a passion of my life to serve the untouchables because I have felt that I could not remain a Hindu if it was true that untouchability was a part of Hinduism” was more than a political statement. It was an attempt to reclaim Hinduism’s ethical core from within – to argue that discrimination was not sacred but sinful, not traditional but a betrayal of tradition. Whether this approach was sufficient is a question that Indian society continues to wrestle with.

What do you think? Can a reform movement that works within the framework of a hierarchical system ever truly dismantle that hierarchy – or does lasting equality require dismantling the structure itself? And how do we evaluate a moral reformer whose views evolved significantly over time: by their earliest positions, their final ones, or the full arc of their thought?

References

1. https://sociology.institute/sociology-in-india/varna-jati-system-indian-society/
2. https://gandhi.study/human-rights-indian-perspective/understanding-gandhi-caste-system-social-reforms/
3. https://www.gandhiashramsevagram.org/selected-letters-of-mahatma/gandhi-letter-extracts-caste-system-and-untouchability.php
4. https://uppcsmagazine.com/evaluation-of-gandhis-views-on-the-varna-system/
5. https://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIR1807747.pdf
6. https://vajiramandravi.com/current-affairs/harijan-sevak-sangh/
7. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/law/poona-pact-grants-representation-indias-untouchables
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harijan_Sevak_Sangh
9. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-asian-studies/article/poona-pact-indian-national-congress-and-the-descriptive-and-substantive-representation-of-dalits-in-colonial-india/C0A2334CEAF6C10CEDE652CA240663E3
10. https://www.nationalheraldindia.com/opinion/gandhi-denounced-caste-and-untouchability
11. https://janataweekly.org/gandhis-approach-to-caste-and-untouchability-a-reappraisal/
12. https://www.uppcsmagazine.com/evaluation-of-gandhis-views-on-the-varna-system/