“The Shudras are the life and sinews of the country”, Jyotirao Phule wrote in Gulamgiri in 1873. More than a century later, researchers in a Punjabi village heard a landowning respondent dismiss the poverty of a labourer with an equally revealing sentence: “He belongs to Chaudhry Big Landlord”. One line recognises the worker as the strength of a country; the other turns him into somebody’s possession. Between them lies the unfinished history of South Asia. Shudra, Ati-Shudra, Dalit and kammi are not interchangeable words. Shudra named the fourth order in the classical varna scheme; communities stigmatised as “untouchable” were often placed outside it as Ati-Shudras or avarnas. Dalit became a modern name of self-assertion.

Kammi in much of rural Punjab denotes hereditary service groups in relation to landowning zamindar communities. These genealogies differ, but their social mechanics overlap: birth predicts work; work is marked as low; land, education and authority stay elsewhere; marriage guards the boundary; dependence is renamed custom. We must reject two comfortable evasions. One is that caste belongs only to Hindu scripture and crossed the border no further than the Radcliffe Line. The other is that every inequality is merely class and will disappear with higher income.

Religion, land, occupation, gender and political power interact differently in each region. A secular investigation asks: who is made to serve, who is permitted to command, and how is that arrangement reproduced?

Jyotirao Govindrao Phule learnt caste not as abstraction but as insult. In 1848, while joining a Brahmin friend’s wedding procession in Pune, he was rebuked for walking as an equal. He returned home wounded, then converted humiliation into a programme. That year he and Savitribai Phule began a school for girls. She had first been taught at home by Jyotirao; she then walked out to teach those whom respectable society preferred to keep ignorant. Orthodox opponents hurled stones and brickbats. The couple did not retreat. 

Savitribai should never appear as a footnote to her husband. She became an educator, organiser and writer in her own right. Together the Phules opened schools for girls and oppressed communities, supported widows and challenged the monopoly over knowledge. Brahmin colleagues aided them at points; the struggle was not a biological quarrel between every Brahmin and every “untouchable”. Their target was Brahmanical power: an order that made inherited rank appear natural, sacred and administratively useful. 

In Gulamgiri—Slavery—Phule dedicated his indictment to American abolitionists. The comparison was polemical and some of his ancient history does not survive modern scholarship. Its governing insight remains: domination is safest when the dominated mistake it for order. He called that condition “mental slavery”. Those who produced revenue through “the sweat of [the ryot’s] brow”, he argued, were denied the education it financed. His demand was not charity, but schools in every village and public power answerable to labour. He had no romantic answer to the British Raj. Colonial rule opened limited spaces in education, print and administration that anti-caste reformers could use. Phule used them, while accusing government of spending poor people’s taxes on upper-class education and offices.

Later scholarship shows how the colonial census and archive gathered fluid local identities under the single hard category of caste. The Raj neither invented hierarchy nor liberated its victims. It catalogued and governed through difference. This is the setting in which Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s campaign against untouchability must be judged. A simple prosecution or acquittal will not do. Gandhi made the degradation of the “untouchable” a national question and lived in ways that violated caste practice. His ashrams admitted families then shunned as untouchable; financial supporters withdrew; he cleaned latrines; he promoted education and called untouchability a moral stain. His position on caste also changed significantly over time. 

The record contains another Gandhi. In the early 1920s he defended caste’s organising capacity and hereditary occupation, while distinguishing an idealised varna from its abuses. In later........

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