Kancha Ilaiah’s Advocacy for Dalitization of Indian Society

When it comes to challenging the deepest foundations of Indian social order, few contemporary thinkers have been as direct, as consequential, or as controversial as Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd. A political theorist, writer, and anti-caste activist, Ilaiah has spent decades arguing that India cannot achieve genuine equality without a wholesale cultural and ideological transformation – one he calls the “Dalitization” of Indian society. This is not a call for marginal reform. It is a demand to replace the organizing values of Indian civilization itself: from caste hierarchy and Brahmanical privilege to labor dignity, communal equality, and Dalit-Bahujan knowledge systems.

Who is Kancha Ilaiah? 🔗

Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd, born on October 5, 1952, in Papaiahpet village of Warangal district in present-day Telangana, belongs to the Kuruma shepherd caste – a community of herders classified as Other Backward Class (OBC). His upbringing in an agrarian household shaped his political consciousness early. He credits his mother, Kancha Kattamma, as a pivotal influence – a woman who stood at the forefront of her community’s resistance against discriminatory practices and police brutality. This lived experience of marginalization became the raw material for Ilaiah’s entire philosophical project.

He went on to become a professor of political science at Osmania University, Hyderabad, and later served as Director of the Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy at Maulana Azad National Urdu University. Though often identified as a Dalit himself, Ilaiah is technically an OBC – but his scholarship and activism have been entirely devoted to the Dalit-Bahujan cause, making him one of the most significant Ambedkarite voices of the contemporary era. In May 2016, he formally added “Shepherd” to his name as a symbolic protest against Brahmanical cultural hegemony, reclaiming his community’s labor identity as a mark of pride rather than shame.

The concept of Dalitization 🔗

“Dalitization” is the central concept in Ilaiah’s philosophical framework, and it is far more radical than simple social reform. As Ilaiah articulates it, the eating of beef, exercising the right to free speech, and living as a human being free of caste politics are not merely identity issues – they are equality issues, issues of Indian democracy maturing. The concept challenges the dominant process of what sociologists have traditionally called “Sanskritization” – the tendency of lower castes to adopt upper-caste practices and values as a route to social mobility. Ilaiah counters this with an opposite trajectory: Dalitization requires the whole of Indian society to learn from Dalitwaadas (Dalit settlements), not the other way around.

At its core, Dalitization means restructuring Indian society around Dalit-Bahujan values rather than absorbing Dalit communities into an existing Brahmanical framework. It insists that Indian civilization cannot progress by continuing to devalue those who produce its food, make its goods, build its roads, and tend its animals. This process is a movement away from identity assertion and toward societal transformation – an affirmation of the dignity of labor at the structural level.

Critique of Hindu fundamentalism and Brahmanical culture 🔗

Ilaiah’s critique of Hindu fundamentalism is both philosophical and political. He argues that what is routinely presented as “Hindu culture” is, in reality, Brahmanical culture – a specific set of values, rituals, and hierarchies that has been universalized and imposed on all Indians regardless of their actual traditions. In his landmark 1996 book Why I Am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture and Political Economy, he systematically examines how Dalitbahujan communities have been continuously “otherized” by Hindutva politics since ancient times. He argues that Sudras and Ati-Sudras possess an original religious, economic, political, and cultural philosophy entirely distinct from Brahminical Hinduism – and that they neither need to be incorporated into nor absorbed by it.

The book constructs a Dalit-Bahujan identity that stands in sharp contrast to Brahminical Hinduism’s self-image as a transcendental, universal faith. Brahminical Hinduism, Ilaiah argues, enshrines elite forms of knowledge – priesthood, statesmanship, Sanskrit learning – while treating the earthbound, productive, community-oriented lives of Dalit-Bahujan communities as spiritually inferior. He specifically challenges the divine iconography of Brahminical religion, pointing out that its gods are repeatedly depicted as agents of violence against those coded as Dalit or Dravida.

His later book Post-Hindu India: A Discourse in Dalit-Bahujan Socio-Spiritual and Scientific Revolution (SAGE, 2009) extends this critique further – challenging Hinduism’s interpretation of history and arguing that its anti-scientific and anti-productive orientation has actively suppressed the scientific and productive potential of Dalit-Bahujan communities. He condemns the concept of varnadharma – the idea that one’s spiritual and social duty is determined by birth – as rooted in spiritual inequality rather than any meaningful conception of justice.

Dalit-Bahujan ideology as an alternative 🔗

Central to Ilaiah’s project is the articulation of a Dalit-Bahujan ideology – a positive, constructive alternative to Brahmanical values rather than simply a negation of them. As Ilaiah argues, Dalit philosophy prizes productivity over personal pleasure, and values the collective grace of community over the elevation of any particular group at the expense of others. He draws a fundamental distinction between two modes of social existence in India: one defined by productive labor, communal sharing, and practical knowledge, and the other defined by ritual consumption, hierarchical purity, and the extraction of surplus from those who do the actual work.

Ilaiah maintains that the caste system positions upper castes as non-productive exploiters who shun physical labor in favor of ritualism, priesthood, and trade manipulation, while Shudras and Dalits sustain society through farming, animal husbandry, leatherwork, pottery, and artisanal skills. In contrast, Dalit-Bahujan economies historically emphasized communal sharing, mutual fairness, and practical innovations like seed selection, soil knowledge, and herbal medicine – all largely free from gender barriers in labor participation. This is not poverty romanticized; it is a different civilizational ethic, one that Ilaiah believes India desperately needs to adopt if it is to become a genuinely egalitarian society.

The Dalit-Bahujan ideology also reclaims the Buddhist philosophical legacy. In his analysis, when the Buddha articulated the concept of bahujan hitaya, bahujan sukhaya (welfare of the many, happiness of the many), he was explicitly referring to all those who gathered food, produced food, or performed manual labor in various forms – the very communities that Brahminical society would later marginalize. This Buddhist foundation gives Dalit-Bahujan ideology a deep historical grounding that extends well beyond modern anti-caste movements.

Dignity of labor: a philosophical cornerstone 🔗

One of the most philosophically significant dimensions of Ilaiah’s thought is his insistence on the dignity of labor as a foundational social value. Traditional Brahmanical thought inverts this: intellectual and ritual work is elevated while manual and productive labor is degraded. Those who farm, tan leather, weave cloth, and clean streets are treated as spiritually polluting – precisely because their work is most essential to society’s survival.

Ilaiah’s co-authored book Turning the Pot, Tilling the Land: Dignity of Labour in Our Times (2007) addresses this directly, examining the productive knowledge systems embedded in Dalit-Bahujan craft and agrarian traditions. He argues that Hinduism failed in constructing the dignity of labor and repeatedly attacked the productive values and energies of Dalitbahujan masses – damaging not just those communities but India’s civilizational development as a whole. An economy that devalues its most productive members cannot develop justly or sustainably.

This argument has direct political implications. Ilaiah connects the degradation of labor to the continued immiseration of Dalit-Bahujan communities – their low wages, poor access to education, limited political representation, and systematic exclusion from the professions. The solution is not charity or reservation alone, but a cultural revolution in how Indian society understands the relationship between work and worth.

Buffalo nationalism vs. cow nationalism 🔗

In his book Buffalo Nationalism: A Critique of Spiritual Fascism (2004), Ilaiah introduces one of his most striking conceptual distinctions. He contrasts “cow nationalism” – the nationalism of the upper castes, which he argues is implemented in a culturally authoritarian manner – with “buffalo nationalism,” which represents the productive, working majority of India. He compares the plight of Dalitbahujan communities to that of the buffalo: an animal that gives more milk than the cow, performs harder labor, and yet holds no sacred status in civil society and no constitutional protection. This analogy captures precisely the social condition Ilaiah identifies – indispensable yet invisible, essential yet disposable.

For Ilaiah, India can be understood in two ways: as a civilization built from the soil by the labor of Adivasis, Dalits, and backward classes – or as a civilization defined by the shastras, the temples, and the philosophical moorings of Brahminical tradition. His entire project is to make the first definition legible, legitimate, and politically empowered.

Education, language, and access to power 🔗

Ilaiah extends his critique into the domains of education and language. He has consistently advocated for English proficiency among Dalit communities, arguing that access to English allows Dalits to engage intellectually with the global world without having non-Dalits speak “for them.” This is not an abandonment of Indian languages but a recognition that language access is power access – that Brahmanical control over Sanskrit learning historically operated as a mechanism of intellectual exclusion, and that English offers a potential equalizer in contemporary India.

He also argues that India’s education system perpetuates caste hierarchies by privileging certain types of knowledge – abstract, textual, ritual – while marginalizing the practical, empirical, productive knowledge that Dalit-Bahujan communities have developed over centuries. Ambedkar’s discourse on social and political democracy was complemented by Ilaiah’s concept of spiritual democracy – the right to equal spiritual citizenship, including the right to become a priest regardless of caste background. Had spiritual democracy existed, he argues, it would have translated into social, economic, and political democracy as well.

Legacy, controversy, and continued relevance 🔗

Ilaiah’s work has had significant institutional impact. Why I Am Not a Hindu has been a consistent bestseller, reaching a third edition and sixteen reprints – remarkable for a work of academic political theory. His books have been included in and then removed from university syllabi, a pattern that reveals precisely the kind of intellectual gatekeeping he has spent his career critiquing. In 2017, his book on the Vysya trading community led to threats on his life, a parliamentary call for his hanging, and a period of self-imposed house arrest – demonstrating that his ideas remain genuinely threatening to entrenched power structures.

His critics argue that his work is polemical rather than scholarly, that it essentializes both Brahminical and Dalit-Bahujan identities, and that it occasionally sacrifices historical nuance for rhetorical force. Yet as the Los Angeles Review of Books notes, his analysis shares a deep kinship with Frantz Fanon’s anti-colonial philosophy – a comparison that underscores both the global significance and the structural seriousness of his project. A combination of Ambedkar’s theoretical deconstruction of caste and Ilaiah’s grounding in Dalit-Bahujan lived realities is increasingly seen as essential to any credible post-Ambedkarite anti-caste movement.

In an India where constitutional equality coexists with pervasive caste discrimination, where reservations are contested and Dalit students are still driven to despair in elite institutions, Ilaiah’s call for Dalitization is not a relic of radical politics. It is a live philosophical demand – that Indian society stop treating the contributions of its most productive members as invisible, and stop measuring human worth by the accident of birth.

What do you think? If “Dalitization” means reorienting all of Indian society around the values of its most productive communities, what would that transformation look like in practice – in schools, workplaces, and public institutions? And can a civilization genuinely change its foundational values, or does structural change always need to precede cultural change?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kancha_Ilaiah
2. https://academicjournals.org/journal/IJSA/article-full-text-pdf/C25901E59025
3. http://mainstreamweekly.net/article12116.html
4. https://jarssc.com/attachments/In-todays-India-the-Caste-System-Dalitization-and-its-Ramifications-Bushra-Fatima.pdf
5. https://www.allaboutambedkaronline.com/post/how-brahminism-ostracizes-the-dalitbahujan-community-a-review-of-ilaiah-s-why-i-am-not-a-hindu
6. https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/another-look-indias-books-kancha-ilaiah-shepherds-not-hindu/
7. https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/node/52535/print
8. https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/1102570
9. https://grokipedia.com/page/Kancha_Ilaiah
10. https://www.islamicity.org/1785/dalit-mobilization-interview-with-dr-kancha-ilaiah/
11. https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1219279
12. https://www.forwardpress.in/2018/12/why-oppose-kancha-ilaiahs-books/