March of Movements

How have the Dravidian movement, the Dalit movement led by Ambedkar and his successors, the Communist movement, and the Hindutva movement articulated by the RSS and the BJP each engaged with caste?

- Anand Teltumbde

CASTE in modern India operates simultaneously as a structure of inequality, a means of political mobilisation, and an idiom for ideological projects of social order—deeply entwined with the country’s power structure.

Although it appears to draw from Hindu scriptures and pre-modern social organisation, its transformation into a political instrument is largely a product of colonial modernity and democratic politics.

The colonial encounter—through the census, ethnographic surveys, and administrative classifications—crystallised fluid social hierarchies into rigid and enumerated categories, rendering caste both more visible and politically consequential. After independence, the framing of the Constitution, the adoption of representative democracy, and the extension of universal suffrage further reconstituted caste: from a system of social hierarchy into a resource for electoral mobilisation and a language of rights-based claims.

Four major political currents—the Dravidian movement in South India, the Dalit movement led by Ambedkar and his successors, the Communist movement inspired by Marxism, and the Hindutva movement articulated by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)—have each engaged with caste. While the first three sought to transcend or dismantle caste within their respective ideological frameworks, each was constrained by its own theoretical and political limits. Hindutva, by contrast, re-legitimised hierarchy under the guise of cultural nationalism, portraying caste as a form of organic and harmonious differentiation.