Literary Testimonies of Dalit Oppression in Ancient India

When we want to understand why millions of people in India were – and still are – treated as less than human, the place to look is not just in history books. The answer is written into some of the most revered texts of ancient India. The Rg-Veda, the Upanishads, the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata are not merely religious or literary masterpieces. Read critically, they are also the earliest literary testimonies to a society being deliberately stratified, with entire communities reduced to the margins of human dignity. For Dalit philosophy, these texts are essential evidence – not of divine order, but of the systematic ideological construction of oppression.

Why ancient texts matter as evidence 🔗

The history of Dalit communities stretches across centuries, from ancient religious texts and social codes that enforced caste hierarchies to modern movements for equality and constitutional rights. What makes the literary record particularly significant is that it doesn’t just narrate social customs – it justifies them. When a religious or philosophical text encodes a social hierarchy as cosmic truth, it becomes far more powerful than law. It makes oppression feel natural, inevitable, even sacred. This is precisely what the ancient Indian literary tradition accomplished over time, and why reading these texts through a critical, Dalit-centric lens reveals so much about the roots of caste discrimination.

It is also important to note from the outset that scholars hold varying views on how directly these texts caused or reflected social reality. As researchers like Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton have noted, there is no evidence in the Rigveda for an elaborate, overarching caste system – the varna system seems embryonic there, functioning more as a social ideal than a social reality. Nevertheless, over time, these texts were used to build that reality, and that is what Dalit philosophy draws our attention to.

The Rg-Veda: where the hierarchy begins 🔗

The Rg-Veda, the oldest of the four Vedas and one of the oldest known sacred texts, was composed in Vedic Sanskrit roughly between 1500 and 500 BCE. It contains 1,028 hymns organized into ten books, and among its most consequential passages is the Purusha Sukta – the Hymn of the Cosmic Person – found in the tenth book.

The Purusha Sukta describes the creation of the world through the sacrifice of a cosmic being named Purusha. From his body emerge the four social classes: the Brahmins (priests and scholars) from his mouth, the Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers) from his arms, the Vaishyas (traders and farmers) from his thighs, and the Shudras (labourers) from his feet. The symbolism is not neutral. The mouth is the seat of wisdom and sacred speech; the feet, the lowest and most polluted part. Even within the varna system, hierarchy is built into the very body of creation.

Critically, those who would become Dalits are not even present in this scheme. The varna system implicitly includes a fifth element – those deemed entirely outside its scope, including tribal peoples and those later called “untouchables” (avarnas). By being excluded altogether from the Purusha’s body, they are rendered sub-human in the cosmological imagination of the text. The hymn doesn’t argue for their oppression; it simply has no place for them in the universe it constructs. That erasure is itself a form of dehumanization.

The Rg-Veda also uses the terms Dasa and Dasyu to describe the non-Aryan peoples encountered by the Vedic tribes. As historical sources note, the Dasyus were described as dark-skinned, speaking unintelligible languages, and reviling the Vedic gods – marking a clear cultural and racial boundary between the conquerors and the conquered. The word “varna” itself means “colour” in Sanskrit, suggesting that from the very beginning, the system was intertwined with distinctions of appearance and identity that mapped onto the Aryan-Dravidian divide.

The Upanishads: philosophy that looked away 🔗

The Upanishads, composed roughly between 800 and 200 BCE, represent a philosophical deepening of Vedic thought. They are celebrated for their exploration of the nature of the self (Atman) and ultimate reality (Brahman), and for the radical idea that all existence shares a single spiritual ground. On the surface, this seems like the philosophical foundation for equality.

In practice, it was not. The Chandogya Upanishad, for example, contains passages that directly connect a person’s birth into a particular social class with the moral quality of their actions in a previous life. The concept of karma and rebirth – that your present condition reflects your past deeds – became a powerful instrument for naturalizing social inequality. If someone is born into a low or outcaste position, the logic runs, they must have earned it. This framework made the suffering of Dalits and lower castes not just acceptable but spiritually correct.

Caste discrimination also manifested through the monopolization of knowledge. The Shudras were not considered dvija – “twice-born” – and were therefore excluded from Vedic learning and ritual. The right to read, recite, and study the Vedas was the exclusive preserve of the upper three varnas. Knowledge, which is power, was structurally denied to those at the bottom. The Upanishads, for all their philosophical beauty, did not challenge this exclusion. They refined the spiritual ideology of a Brahmanical social order while leaving its material hierarchies intact.

The Ramayana: caste written into heroic virtue 🔗

The Ramayana, traditionally attributed to the sage Valmiki, is one of the two great epics of the Hindu tradition. It is primarily the story of Rama – his exile, his battle against the demon king Ravana, and his eventual return to rule the kingdom of Ayodhya. It is deeply admired as a moral tale of duty, love, and righteousness. Yet embedded within it are episodes that reveal how completely caste hierarchy had become part of the moral fabric of ancient Indian society.

The most striking of these is the story of Shambuka. According to the Uttara Kanda (the final section of the Valmiki Ramayana), a Brahmin approaches King Rama, grieving over the death of his young son. The sage Narada explains that a Shudra named Shambuka has been performing tapas – religious austerities – and that this transgression against dharma is the cause of the child’s death. Rama flies to the forest, finds Shambuka in meditation, and beheads him. The gods then celebrate Rama’s action and shower him with flowers.

The episode is stark in its implications. A Shudra aspiring to spiritual practice – something reserved for the higher castes – is killed not for any crime against a person, but for crossing a caste boundary. B.R. Ambedkar, in his essay Annihilation of Caste, pointed to this story as evidence that the caste system could only be maintained by the threat of lethal force. Thinkers like Periyar used it to powerfully criticize caste-based violence, arguing that this kind of story, presented approvingly, teaches that a Shudra’s very aspiration is a threat to social order. The story of Shambuka is well-known among Dalit communities precisely because it mirrors realities they have faced for generations.

It is worth noting that scholars like Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi regarded the Shambuka episode as a later interpolation, not part of the original text. But whether interpolation or original, the episode became part of the ongoing Ramayana tradition and has functioned as a cultural and ideological text shaping attitudes toward lower-caste aspirations for centuries.

The Mahabharata: caste hierarchy in human drama 🔗

The Mahabharata, the longest epic in the world and traditionally attributed to the sage Vyasa, is far more than a war story. It is a vast moral and philosophical universe containing the Bhagavad Gita, treatises on statecraft, and countless stories of human complexity. It also contains some of the most powerful literary depictions of caste oppression in the entire ancient world.

Ekalavya: talent crushed by birth 🔗

The story of Ekalavya is one of the most cited examples of caste-based discrimination in ancient literature. Ekalavya was the son of a Nishada – a low-caste forest-dwelling community. He desperately wanted to learn archery from the great teacher Dronacharya, but was refused because he was not a Kshatriya. Undeterred, he fashioned a clay image of Drona and taught himself, becoming extraordinarily skilled – arguably the finest archer in the land.

When Drona eventually discovered this, fearing that Ekalavya’s skill might surpass that of his prized Kshatriya student Arjuna, he demanded guru dakshina – a traditional gift from student to teacher. His demand was Ekalavya’s right thumb. As historian Audrey Truschke has noted, Ekalavya, having internalized the caste prejudice that condemned him, cut off his thumb and was never again a threat to Arjuna. The system did not need to fight Ekalavya with weapons. It simply made him believe that his own destruction was the right thing to do.

What makes the Ekalavya story particularly revealing is that it presents this injustice without condemnation. The narrative frames Drona’s demand as an act of cunning necessity, not cruelty. The text, in other words, normalizes the oppression. Scholars have pointed out that characters like Ekalavya were given no voice in the epic’s narrative – their marginalization is depicted but not questioned, highlighting the societal prejudices of the time.

Karna: the warrior denied his identity 🔗

The Mahabharata’s story of Karna adds another dimension. Karna was raised by Adhiratha, a charioteer from a low-caste (suta) community. Despite possessing extraordinary martial abilities, he was repeatedly denied recognition. When Karna sought to demonstrate his archery at a public tournament, he was barred from challenging the Kshatriya Arjuna because only a Kshatriya could challenge another Kshatriya. His skill was undeniable; his birth was the obstacle. Together, Ekalavya and Karna show that the Mahabharata’s world was one in which no amount of individual merit could overcome the accident of caste birth.

The cumulative picture: from social ideal to lived oppression 🔗

Reading across the Rg-Veda, Upanishads, Ramayana, and Mahabharata, a pattern emerges. What begins in the Vedas as a classification of social roles hardens, text by text, into a rigid and enforced hierarchy. The Purusha Sukta frames cosmic creation in hierarchical terms. The Upanishads give that hierarchy a philosophical justification through karma and rebirth. The epics dramatize its enforcement, showing what happens to those who dare to transgress its boundaries – death for Shambuka, mutilation for Ekalavya, public humiliation for Karna.

The groups most associated with this subordinate position – the Shudras and those below even the Shudra varna – correspond historically to the non-Aryan, Dravidian, and tribal populations who were progressively absorbed into an Aryan-dominated social order as a subjugated class. Over time, the system became increasingly rigid, and the emergence of jati (sub-caste) led to further entrenchment, introducing thousands of new castes and sub-castes, each with its own hierarchy of purity and pollution.

Dalit philosophy, as articulated by thinkers from B.R. Ambedkar onward, insists that this literary record must be read honestly – not to condemn entire traditions wholesale, but to understand how ideology operates. The texts did not simply describe a world; they helped construct one. They made oppression feel natural, giving it the language of cosmic order, divine duty, and spiritual law. Recognizing this is the first step toward dismantling it. India banned caste discrimination after independence in 1947 and enshrined legal protections in its Constitution, but the ideological work of challenging the ancient literary record that normalized this oppression is an ongoing task for philosophers, educators, and citizens alike.

What do you think? If ancient texts were used to justify a social hierarchy, does critically examining them undermine those traditions entirely – or is it possible to reclaim their philosophical depth while rejecting the caste ideology embedded within them? And given that these texts shaped centuries of lived suffering, how much weight should literary and religious authority carry in a society committed to equality?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalit_history
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varna_(Hinduism)
3. https://courses.lumenlearning.com/atd-herkimer-worldcivilization/chapter/the-vedas/
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India
5. https://factsanddetails.com/india/History/sub7_1a/entry-4102.html
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shudra
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shambuka
8. https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/ambedkar/web/texts/6755.html
9. https://www.roundtableindia.co.in/eklavya-and-karna-an-understanding-of-discrimination-of-marginalised-in-indian-education-system/
10. https://www.groundxero.in/2021/02/23/dharma-in-mahabharata-is-a-brahminical-construction-not-any-transcendental-ethical-values/
11. https://www.thestatesman.com/supplements/ekalavyas-story-is-of-unquestioned-obedience-sanjukta-dasgupta-1503308690.html