"Untouchability as a religiously legitimated practice attached to certain hereditary Indian castes was well established by 100 B.C. Hindu religious texts rationalized untouchability with reference to karma and rebirth; one was born into an Untouchable caste because of the accumulation of heinous sins in previous births. Theories of modern villagers are often more hazy, but belief in the innately and legitimately inferior status of Untouchables is no less strong; similar attitudes often surface among sophisticated urbanites. During recent riots against special access rules for Untouchables to professional schools, a leading sociologist wrote angrily of cases in which qualified Untouchable applicants to medical schools were told to go back to being sweepers.The cultural denigration of Untouchables has long had important economic implications. Untouchability, like racism in the Western world, has served to rationalize and maintain a vast pool of cheap labor. It has also limited competition for those goods and positions that have defined power and prestige, whatever these have been over the years - land, the priesthood, modern white-collar professions. In protesting their status. Untouchables challenge the high degree of self-interest and deeply ingrained social beliefs that permeate Hindu society. Increasingly, the Untouchables have insisted on rising above this institution.A number of factors produced this challenge. Colonialism brought with it a limited exposure to more egalitarian values. Pre-Independence maneuvers between the British and a variety of Indian groups sometimes led to competitive efforts to woo Untouchable allegiance in ways that further encouraged Untouchables to redefine their perceptions of self and society. Mahatma Gandhi's reform movement, which introduced the term Harijan (children of God), is the best known, but autonomous self-respect movements that developed within the Untouchable communities may well have had a more lasting impact. Certainly the change of values among Untouchables has far outrun change in the dominant society. One Untouchable leader, the late Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, was also able to use the British/nationalist conflict to introduce policies that improved Untouchable access to education and government jobs and provided for constitutionally guaranteed proportional legislative representation. The results have fallen far short of Ambedkar's dreams, but political parties are obliged to pay competitive lip service to Untouchable interests, and a new generation of Untouchable youth is now sufficiently well-educated to be bitterly aware of the glaring gap between promise and performance.
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Mathew Abraham was born in Kerala and he completed his education in Kerala. As a social activist, he was deeply involved in the Dalit movement and did a research study on the movement. He writes regularly both for national journals and magazine publications.