Impact of Major Religions on Dalits in India

For millions of Dalits in India, religion has never been a simple matter of faith. It has been a battlefield – a space where oppression was justified, challenged, escaped, and sometimes recreated. Positioned outside the four varnas of the Hindu caste order, Dalits have historically been branded as “untouchables,” subjected to some of the most dehumanizing forms of social exclusion the world has known. Over centuries, many have turned to other religions – Christianity, Islam, Buddhism – seeking the dignity that their birth circumstances denied them. But the relationship between Dalits and religion is far more tangled than a story of simple escape. It is a story of hope, betrayal, resistance, and the stubborn persistence of caste across every religious boundary.

Hinduism and the religious roots of caste oppression
Christianity: promise of equality and the limits of conversion
The legal double bind
Islam: brotherhood in theory, caste in practice
Ambedkar’s turn to Buddhism: conversion as liberation
Caste beyond religion: a structural reality

Hinduism and the religious roots of caste oppression

The caste system’s most direct justification has historically come from within Hinduism. Caste is traditionally associated with Hinduism, rooted in the ancient framework of varna, which placed Brahmins at the top and rendered Dalits entirely outside the social order – assigned to occupations considered ritually “polluted,” such as cleaning, leather-working, and manual scavenging. The system was not merely social custom; it was undergirded by religious authority, presenting caste hierarchy as divinely ordained and immutable.

The Bhakti movement, which emerged around the 7th century CE, offered one of the earliest internal challenges to this order. Saints like Kabir, Ravidas, and Namdev preached devotion to God as transcending caste distinctions and ritual purity. Their message was radical for its time – but it did not dismantle the structural caste hierarchy. Upper-caste gatekeeping of temples, sacred texts, and ritual spaces continued. Dalit entry into Hindu temples was routinely denied well into the 20th century. The spiritual was mobilized not to liberate the oppressed, but to legitimize their oppression.

It was Dr. B.R. Ambedkar who most systematically dismantled the religious defence of caste. He argued that Hinduism was not incidentally caste-based, but structurally so – that caste oppression was not an artifact of Brahminism but its very essence. In his landmark 1936 address Annihilation of Caste, Ambedkar insisted that any religion worthy of human dignity must be consonant with liberty, equality, and fraternity. Hinduism, in his view, failed this test entirely.

Christianity: promise of equality and the limits of conversion

Christianity arrived in India in multiple waves – through the legendary mission of Apostle Thomas in the 1st century CE, and more systematically through Portuguese, Dutch, and British missionaries during the colonial period. For Dalits, the Christian message of equality before God carried genuine appeal. Christian missionaries brought modern education to India and extended it to Dalits, who had been denied learning under the oppressive caste system, leading to meaningful improvements in literacy and social mobility.

Missionary institutions opened schools in regions where Dalits had been historically excluded from education. Research on the impact of missionary education in Bihar shows that access to quality schooling through missionary efforts created significant opportunities for socio-economic advancement among Dalits, including entry into professional careers that had been entirely inaccessible before. In South India, missionaries also actively challenged caste-based social customs, including advocating for Dalit women’s right to cover their bodies – a right previously denied by upper-caste norms.

Yet conversion did not deliver the promised equality. South Asian Christians with Dalit family histories continued to face prejudice from their new co-religionists, excluded from or segregated at places of worship and burial sites. Church hierarchies reproduced the social hierarchies Dalits had sought to escape. Those who had converted from higher Hindu castes occupied privileged positions within Christian communities, while those who converted from Dalit castes remained at the bottom.

A state commission examining Dalit Christians found that they were “twice discriminated against” – in society at large and within the church itself. Dalit Christians could rarely aspire to senior positions within church institutions. In some congregations, they were not even permitted to occupy the same pews as upper-caste Christians. The doctrine of equality before God collided with the deeply ingrained social reality of caste.

The legal double bind

The exclusion of Dalit Christians from constitutional protections compounds the injustice further. India’s Constitution (Scheduled Castes) Order of 1950 specifies that no person practising a religion other than Hinduism shall be considered a member of a Scheduled Caste, thereby stripping Dalit Christians of access to reservation benefits – the affirmative action provisions designed to address centuries of caste-based disadvantage. In practical terms, this means that the act of religious conversion, taken precisely to escape discrimination, results in the loss of the very legal protections meant to address that discrimination.

Sikhs and Buddhists were later included in the Scheduled Caste framework (in 1956 and 1990 respectively), but Dalit Christians and Muslims remain excluded. The Kaka Kalelkar Commission as early as 1955 officially noted that the stigma of untouchability had deeply infected Indian Christian and Muslim communities, yet successive governments declined to alter the legal framework. The matter remains before the Supreme Court, with a dedicated Balakrishnan Commission tasked with examining the socio-economic conditions of converted Dalits – though its term has been extended repeatedly, drawing criticism from activists.

Islam: brotherhood in theory, caste in practice

Islam arrived in India from the 7th century onwards, and its core theological message – the equality of all believers before God, united in the community of the ummah – offered a powerful contrast to the Hindu caste order. In the early centuries of Islamic presence in India, many Dalits converted to Islam, drawn by the promise of social equality and freedom from the pollution-purity framework of caste. For communities at the very bottom of the Hindu hierarchy, the Islamic emphasis on brotherhood was genuinely liberating in intent.

But caste proved more durable than theology. With the arrival of Islamic rule, caste-like distinctions were formulated in certain Muslim communities, primarily in North India. Muslim society in India became stratified between Ashrafs – those claiming descent from Arab, Persian, or Afghan ancestry – Ajlafs (converts from artisanal Hindu castes), and Arzals, converts from Dalit communities who faced the most severe discrimination. The term “Arzal” itself carries the meaning of “vile” or “vulgar,” reflecting the demeaning status assigned to Dalit Muslims within their own religious community.

Dr. Ambedkar himself documented this hierarchy within Muslim communities, identifying internal divisions organized along hereditary occupational lines. He found these distinctions to be “of exactly the same nature” as caste divisions among Hindus, concluding that caste persists as a social structure within Muslim communities despite Islamic theology’s claims of equality. This analysis has been reinforced by contemporary research showing that Dalit Muslims face discrimination not only from dominant-caste Hindus but also from within their own religious community – including restrictions on access to mosques and burial grounds.

The legal situation of Dalit Muslims mirrors that of Dalit Christians: excluded from Scheduled Caste protections, they carry the social burden of caste without the legal tools to contest it.

Ambedkar’s turn to Buddhism: conversion as liberation

If Christianity and Islam both proved to replicate caste in practice, Buddhism offered Ambedkar something different – a religion indigenous to India, doctrinally anti-caste, and free from the theological justifications that underpinned the Hindu varna system. After two decades of comparative religious study, Ambedkar concluded that Buddhism alone genuinely denied caste and rejected a divinely ordered, birth-based hierarchy.

On October 14, 1956, Ambedkar converted to Buddhism along with nearly half a million followers at Deekshabhoomi in Nagpur, in what became one of the largest mass religious conversions in modern history. He called his interpretation Navayana – “new vehicle” – reframing Buddhism not around the four noble truths of traditional doctrine, but as a religion of principles emphasizing equality, fraternity, and social justice. For Ambedkar, Buddhism was not an escape from politics but an extension of it – a framework for reclaiming human dignity on philosophical grounds.

The 22 vows taken by Ambedkar and his followers at the conversion ceremony were explicitly anti-Hindu, renouncing belief in the caste system and pledging to follow the Buddha’s principles of equality and compassion. The act of reciting these 22 vows was a revolutionary transformation – not just a change of religious label, but a collective, public rejection of the social order that had degraded Dalits for centuries.

The results have been real but partial. An overwhelming majority of Buddhists in India today identify as Dalits, and the Buddhist community has developed a distinct cultural and political identity rooted in Ambedkarite thought. Studies show that Ambedkarite Buddhists in Maharashtra exhibit a stronger sense of individual and collective identity than comparable Hindu lower-caste groups. Yet economic disparities persist, caste-based violence has not disappeared, and the limits of conversion as a solution to structural poverty remain apparent. As researchers note, conversion is not a magical remedy – it requires parallel social, political, and economic transformation to deliver the equality it promises.

Caste beyond religion: a structural reality

The experience of Dalits across Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism points to a single, uncomfortable conclusion: caste is not primarily a religious phenomenon. It is a structural one. Caste identity pervades Indian society across all religious communities – an estimated 98% of contemporary Indians, regardless of whether they are Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, or Jain, identify with a caste. Caste identities persist for generations after conversion, regulating marriage, social interaction, occupational access, and everyday dignity.

Intercaste marriages in India have remained at approximately 5% of all marriages over the past several decades, across religious communities. A 2014 survey found one in four Indians still practising untouchability in some form. Sociological research, historical analysis, and lived experience consistently demonstrate that caste persists across religious boundaries through occupation, endogamy, and everyday practices of exclusion.

This does not make religious conversion meaningless – far from it. For many Dalits, conversion has been a profoundly meaningful act of agency, a way of refusing the spiritual justification for their oppression, and in many cases a genuine gateway to education, community, and dignity. But it does mean that religion alone cannot dissolve what centuries of social structure have built. The liberation of Dalits requires transformation at every level – legal, economic, political, and social – not just a change of faith.

What do you think? If caste persists across Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism alike, does religious conversion remain a meaningful path to Dalit liberation – or does structural change need to come first? And given that the Indian state continues to deny Scheduled Caste protections to Dalit Christians and Muslims, is the constitutional promise of equality equally available to all Dalits, regardless of their faith?

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Table of Contents

Hinduism and the religious roots of caste oppression 🔗

Christianity: promise of equality and the limits of conversion 🔗

The legal double bind 🔗

Islam: brotherhood in theory, caste in practice 🔗

Ambedkar’s turn to Buddhism: conversion as liberation 🔗

Caste beyond religion: a structural reality 🔗