'A Tyranny Against Nature': The Untouchables in Western India
In this article Rosalind O'Hanlon describes the effects of Hindu religious hierarchies upon the daily life of Untouchables in traditional Indian society and discusses some of the forces associated with British rule that worked to change both the social position of Untouchables and their perception of their position.
Among the most colourful and often bewildering first impressions of western Indian society that its earliest British administrators received, the Indian caste system and its most glaring manifestation in the phenomenon of untouchability stood very much to the fore. Kept at a distance from caste Hindu society in his own settlements outside the village walls, resigned to the humiliations of his lot as the village sweeper, watchman, messenger and disposer of carrion, irredeemably unclean as the punishment for sins supposedly committed in previous existences, the untouchable seemed to stand as the symbol of all that appeared most alien in Hindu social organisation. The ascription of a rigid social status and occupation by birth, with an apparent disregard for the natural talents of the individual or the merits of his social conduct, seemed incomprehensible and unjust to many early British observers, both on an ideological level, and, more immediately, on a personal one.
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