The Foundation of Dalit Living: Labour and Community Building

Labour is not just an economic activity – for Dalit communities in India, it has been the ground on which survival, identity, and resistance have all played out simultaneously. For centuries, the caste system determined not only what work a person could do, but also how that work was valued, who could demand it, and under what conditions it was performed. Dalit philosophy confronts this reality head-on, reclaiming labour as a source of dignity rather than degradation, and turning the shared experience of toil into the foundation of a collective movement toward a casteless, just society.

Labour under caste: a system of forced division 🔗

To understand Dalit philosophy’s relationship with labour, it helps to start with what the caste system actually did to workers. Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, in his landmark 1936 work Annihilation of Caste, made a pointed distinction that still resonates today: the caste system was not merely a division of labour – it was a division of labourers. The difference matters enormously. A division of labour organises work by skill, aptitude, and need. A division of labourers assigns human beings to specific occupations at birth, permanently, with no regard for individual ability or consent.

Ambedkar argued that Indian society could not achieve true democracy unless it dismantled the structures that degraded manual labour and those who performed it. He insisted that without economic democracy – the freedom to choose one’s occupation, earn with dignity, and participate equally in productive life – political democracy would remain hollow. In his framing, the right to vote was meaningless if a Dalit worker could still be assigned to scavenge human waste by hereditary decree.

Landlessness has historically compounded this problem, making Dalits economically dependent on dominant-caste landlords. Bonded labour systems such as the Khoti and Watandari (or Vatandari) structures in Maharashtra, for example, tied Dalit agricultural workers to landlords’ fields in exchange for land grants – a feudal arrangement that transformed what looked like resource access into permanent servitude. In January 1938, Ambedkar launched a movement alongside the Congress Socialist Party to oppose these systems, drawing twenty thousand farmers into a procession in Bombay.

The philosophical claim: dignity belongs to all labour 🔗

Dalit philosophy does not merely protest the conditions of Dalit labour – it makes a deeper philosophical claim: that all productive labour is inherently dignified, and that any social order which says otherwise is morally incoherent. This is a direct challenge to the Brahminical hierarchy that placed intellectual and priestly work at the top of a scale of human worth, while treating physical, agricultural, and artisanal labour as spiritually polluting.

This re-valuation of labour has deep roots. The 15th-16th century saint-poet Guru Ravidas, born into the leather-working caste, chose not to abandon his “polluted” occupation but instead turned it into a site of spiritual and social protest. Rather than escaping his caste identity through conversion or cultural assimilation, he embraced his work and used the Bhakti tradition to assert that devotion to a formless God – combined with honest labour – was a path to dignity that required no priestly intermediary and no upper-caste approval. He emphasised self-respect, dignity of labour, and fearlessness, laying out a democratic and egalitarian philosophy centuries before the modern Dalit movement.

Ambedkar brought this philosophical inheritance into the modern industrial era. Just as Karl Marx had identified the alienation of labour under capitalism, Ambedkar highlighted the dehumanisation of labour under caste – but he went further, showing how caste intertwined social, religious, and economic hierarchies to make exploitation far more insidious than class alone could explain. For Ambedkar, rescuing labour from this dehumanisation was not a side project – it was central to the construction of a genuinely democratic society.

Caste-based “dirty work” and the politics of invisibility 🔗

One persistent mechanism of labour-based oppression has been the ideological branding of certain occupations as inherently impure – and then assigning those occupations to Dalits. Research on Dalit janitorial workers in Chennai following the 2015 floods found that the framing of their labour as “dirty work” forced them to operate in appalling and unsafe conditions, while their suffering and occupational hazards were rendered invisible and unacknowledged. This is not an accident of poverty – it is a structural outcome of a system that treats certain workers as non-grievable, whose labour sustains everyone but whose dignity concerns no one.

The International Dalit Solidarity Network estimates that more than 200 million Dalits live in India alone, with Dalits constituting 83 percent of the 3.6 million plantation workers in South Asia. Manual scavenging – the manual removal of human excrement – persists as a caste-based occupation despite legal prohibition, a stark reminder that the philosophical problem of labour dehumanisation has not been resolved by formal legal change alone.

Ambedkar’s labour activism: translating philosophy into practice 🔗

Dalit philosophy’s claim for labour dignity was never purely abstract. Ambedkar consistently translated it into concrete institutional action. When he founded the Independent Labour Party (ILP) on 15 August 1936, he included socialism in its aims and pushed for strong labour protections: remunerative wages, paid leave, maternity benefits, and limits on working hours. The ILP won a decisive 15 of 17 seats in the Bombay Legislative Assembly in 1937, demonstrating that labour rights as framed through an anti-caste lens had genuine political traction.

During his tenure as Labour Member of the Viceroy’s Council from 1942 to 1946, Ambedkar pushed through amendments to the Indian Mines Act, securing crèche facilities for children in mines where women were employed and establishing separate bathing facilities for male and female workers. These were not minor procedural reforms – they were tangible recognitions that workers’ bodies and lives had value, regardless of caste.

Ambedkar strongly advocated for the eight-hour workday, maternity benefits, and trade union rights, believing that true democracy requires social and economic equality for workers. He also understood that individual workers – especially those from marginalised castes – had limited bargaining power alone, and so championed collective organisation through trade unions as a structural counterweight to exploitation. Within textile mills, Dalit workers had been systematically excluded from departments considered honourable, assigned instead only to thread-holding and cleaning. Ambedkar’s insistence on ending this discrimination was a defining intervention in the working-class movement that even communist unions of the time had largely ignored.

Community as the vehicle: building solidarity across shared struggle 🔗

What distinguishes Dalit philosophy from a simple labour rights movement is its insistence that individual workers cannot achieve liberation in isolation – community solidarity is not a supplement to the struggle, it is its engine. The Dalit Solidarity Peoples programme, established through a gathering of Dalit intellectuals, activists, and leaders professing different religious faiths and regional backgrounds, was founded precisely to unite Dalits across their internal differences on the basis of their common experience of untouchability, poverty, and powerlessness.

The Dalit Panthers, formed in 1972 and inspired partly by the Black Panthers in the United States, released a manifesto that made community-building through labour solidarity explicit: they declared they would build organisations of workers, Dalits, landless labourers, and poor peasants across both city factories and villages. Their manifesto called for land distribution to Dalit peasants, increased wages for landless labourers, and free education, healthcare, and housing – a comprehensive programme that treated material labour conditions and social dignity as inseparable.

The caste system structurally discourages solidarity among its victims by keeping communities divided, suspicious, and envious of one another – ensuring that those at the top remain stable while the marginalised compete for the bottom rungs. Dalit community-building is, in this sense, a direct philosophical and political counter-move: choosing cooperation where caste prescribes division, choosing mutual recognition where caste prescribes hierarchy.

The vision of a casteless society 🔗

All of this labour activism and community-building converges on a single philosophical horizon: the creation of a casteless society where a person’s occupation, dignity, and social worth are not determined by birth. Ambedkar envisioned a just society based on three fundamental principles – liberty, equality, and fraternity – and argued that none of these were achievable while caste organised the distribution of labour and its rewards.

Dalits and other caste-affected groups have historically faced violent sanctions and social and economic boycotts when they challenge untouchability practices and traditional norms. Yet resistance has persisted, and contemporary movements continue to link economic justice with the goal of caste abolition, emphasising structural reform as the only meaningful path forward.

Internationally, networks like the International Dalit Solidarity Network now bring Dalit rights advocacy to the United Nations, the International Labour Organisation, the European Parliament, and other global institutions – demonstrating that the philosophical argument for the dignity of Dalit labour has become a recognized human rights question, not merely a domestic social issue. Even so, caste-based occupational segregation persists in many regions of India, and Ambedkar’s call for dignity of labour and equality in occupational freedom remains an unfinished project.

Labour as a moral foundation, not just an economic fact 🔗

What Dalit philosophy ultimately insists on is that labour is not merely how communities survive economically – it is how they assert their humanity, build their collective identity, and stake their claim to a just future. The demand is not simply for better wages or safer conditions, though both matter. It is a demand that the human being behind every act of work – the farmer, the sanitation worker, the weaver, the leather craftsperson – be recognised as fully and equally human.

Ambedkar viewed labour rights not merely as a pursuit of better wages or working conditions, but as a fundamental means of achieving social justice. This is the core of the Dalit philosophical position on labour: that dignity at work and dignity as a person are not separate questions. When communities organise around shared labour struggles – demanding equal pay, freedom from bonded work, access to all occupations – they are simultaneously building the social trust and political solidarity that a casteless society requires. The foundation of Dalit living, in this sense, is not just labour itself, but the principled refusal to allow labour to be used as an instrument of permanent subjugation.

What do you think? If all productive labour is philosophically equal in value, why do social hierarchies based on occupation persist even in societies with formal legal equality? And can a truly casteless society be built through economic and labour reform alone, or does it require a deeper transformation of cultural values?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annihilation_of_Caste
2. https://www.ijfmr.com/papers/2025/4/54088.pdf
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalit_history
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5. https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/faith-dignity-of-labour-and-dalit-assertion/
6. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/business-ethics-quarterly/article/abs/decasticization-dignity-and-dirty-work-at-the-intersections-of-caste-memory-and-disaster/CA300D91829320A975B07F18C292C7DF
7. https://idsn.org/
8. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/southasia/2025/01/27/b-r-ambedkar-and-a-legacy-of-labour-empowerment/
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10. https://www.oikoumene.org/resources/documents/dalit-solidarity-peoples-dsp-the-vision
11. https://cooperism.law.columbia.edu/disha-wadekar-black-panthers-and-dalit-panthers/
12. https://www.globalministries.org/resource/caste-and-the-dalits-an-introduction/
13. https://www.questjournals.org/jrhss/papers/vol11-issue1/11010608.pdf
14. https://www.hindusforhumanrights.org/hinduism-and-caste
15. https://idsn.org/about-us/what-we-do/