Religious Legitimation and Delegitimations of Social Relations of Power (of Caste): The Case of the Dalits in Historical Perspective

Religious Legitimation and Delegitimations of Social Relations of Power (of Caste): The Case of the Dalits in Historical Perspective is an essay by A. M. A. Ayrookuzhiel, first published in Religion and Society, Volume XL, No. 4, December 1993 (Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society Publication Trust). The essay examines how the marginalisation of Dalits, who constitute approximately 15% of the Indian population, was historically constructed through religious legitimation, and how counter-traditions within Indian civilisation persistently challenged this order. Drawing on Brahmanical texts, Buddhist and Sramana traditions, South Indian Siddhar poetry, Bhakti movements, and the lived religious practices of Dalit communities, Ayrookuzhiel traces both the mechanisms of caste domination and the religious resources available for its critique and delegitimation.

Overview
Religious legitimation of caste
Religious delegitimation of caste
Dalit cultural and religious resources
The ministry of the church
Full text
Publication

Overview

A. M. A. Ayrookuzhiel opens by locating Dalit powerlessness within a long historical process rooted in ancient racial and ethnic conflicts, military defeat, loss of territory, and eventual enslavement. The absence of power is not a natural or theological given but a historical product, expressed in the present through lack of land, education, and employment, and through dependence on dominant groups across economic, social, political, and religio-cultural domains. The essay sets out to trace how this condition came to be legitimated through religion, and equally how religion served as a site of resistance and delegitimation.

Religious Legitimation of Caste

The essay identifies the Purusha-Sukta hymn in the tenth book of the Rig Veda as the earliest textual instance of religious legitimation of social hierarchy in the Brahmanical tradition. The hymn provides a sacred origin for the fourfold varna order, transforming what Ayrookuzhiel describes as social conditions produced by force, control of wealth, ethnic conflict, and class differentiation into a divinely sanctioned structure. The Manusmriti extended this framework by explicitly naming excluded peoples such as the Dasyus and Mlecchas, and codifying rules governing their dwellings, dress, food, movement, and duties, with the king charged with enforcing this order.

Ayrookuzhiel argues that doctrines associated with the Bhagavad Gita and later Hindu theology, particularly adhikara bheda, provided further philosophical grounding, asserting that different human beings are innately constituted for different religio-moral roles. Ayrookuzhiel draws on Saral Jhingran’s analysis to show how the law of karma, while offering a framework for individual moral responsibility, simultaneously explained and justified inherited social inequalities as consequences of past action, encouraging indifference to the suffering of others. These textual doctrines were reinforced at the popular level through myths associated with folk deities, village festivals, and domestic rituals that embedded caste distinctions in everyday religious consciousness.

The essay illustrates this through several concrete examples. A myth associated with the South Indian mother deity Arunjyoti encodes the subordination of Madigas through its narrative structure itself. A 1989 incident in Benche village, Karnataka, reported in the Deccan Herald, shows Dalits subjected to a social boycott after refusing to perform a ritually demeaning caste role during a village festival. A third example from Ayrookuzhiel’s own field study in the Malabar region records a Dalit postman facing a court defence grounded in ritual purity laws. Taken together, these examples demonstrate how religious authority reinforced economic and political domination at the level of daily life.

Religious Delegitimation of Caste

Against this, Ayrookuzhiel traces a counter-tradition rooted in the ancient Sramana movement, which rejected both Vedic authority and the hereditary priesthood of the Brahmins. The Sramanas drew on empirical observation and inner experience rather than priestly tradition, and the essay suggests that elements of this tradition could also be traced back to the Indus Valley Civilisation of the Dravidians and others. The Buddha’s teaching that one becomes a Brahmin or an outcaste by deeds rather than by birth directly inverted the logic of hereditary caste, and the Buddha’s Order admitted members from all social ranks, including barbers, scavengers, peasants, slaves, fisherfolk, and chandala women.

The essay also draws attention to ascetic and critical voices within Hindu epic and Puranic literature itself, where personal virtue is at times placed above ritual purity, and the Upanishadic teaching of the identity of the self and Brahman contradicts the caste dharma of the Gita. In South India, the Siddhar tradition, with literary evidence from around the sixth century A.D., continued this ancient current. Tirumular affirmed that mankind is one and God is one. Sivavakkiyar asked whether any mark on flesh, skin, or bone distinguished an untouchable woman from a Brahmin woman. The Tirukkural, which Ayrookuzhiel describes as being considered “the bane of the Tamil Brahmin priests”, taught forgiveness, universal love, and service to others as the highest values.

A. M. A. Ayrookuzhiel argues that the Bhakti movements which spread from South India to the North had their roots in the autochthonous traditions of indigenous communities, and that it was saints from the low castes and untouchable castes who took the movement to its logical conclusion against social hierarchy. Figures such as Ravidas, Chokkamela, Kabir, Tukaram, Kanaka Das, Vemana, and Narayana Guru, among many others, preached a religion of one God and one humanity against the varnasrama dharma of the Brahmanical priestly class.

Dalit Cultural and Religious Resources

A substantial portion of the essay is devoted to recovering the anti-caste cultural and religious resources preserved within Dalit communities themselves. Ayrookuzhiel acknowledges that a fully integrated cultural history of the traditional untouchable communities remains to be written, but identifies several characteristic features from regional material.

Dalit communities possess gods and goddesses whose associated myths and stories at times legitimise their subordination, yet alongside these are deities and traditions that condemn caste and proclaim universal human community. The essay cites the dance song of Pottan from the Malabar region, in which a Dalit figure confronts caste hierarchy by pointing to the shared humanity of blood, food, and bodily experience. Among the Madigas, Ayrookuzhiel describes a secret Sakti worship sect documented by Emma Rauschenbusch-Clough, in which members from Brahmin and other caste groups join together with Madigas in rituals explicitly designed to dissolve caste and family distinctions. The Pariahs of Kerala preserve the tradition of Pakkanar, a figure of Chandala origin associated with subverting Brahminic conventions of auspicious time and ritual propriety. Dalit communities also retain proprietary rights and priestly privileges associated with deities now under caste control, as well as anti-Brahminic proverbs circulating in popular oral culture. These materials collectively establish, in Ayrookuzhiel’s reading, that an anti-caste cultural ethos is present both in classical ascetic traditions and in the popular traditions of Dalit communities themselves.

The Ministry of the Church

The essay closes with a reflection addressed to the churches. A. M. A. Ayrookuzhiel observes that Dalits have entered a new stage in Indian history, becoming a decisive force in the country’s political future. The old religious values that legitimised their oppression can no longer hold. He suggests that the revitalisation of the ascetic and sanyasic resources of India may offer the churches a direction for overcoming caste consciousness among Dalit and non-Dalit Christians alike. The theological and ideological resources for a people’s ministry are to be found not in elite textual traditions but in the scattered popular traditions of the powerless, among Dalits, tribals, and women, where counter-cultural values and alternative religious memories have been preserved within and against the dominant structures.

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Publication

This essay first appeared in Religion and Society, Volume XL, No. 4, December 1993, published by the Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society Publication Trust.