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History attests to the prevalence of social divisions in  Indian society, such as caste, gender, class, etc. Such divisions have altered the entire Indian society. Whether Dalits, lower castes, or women, the exploited sections are being relentlessly pushed to the edge by the conventional Brahmanical oppressive framework. Dalits are people who have been exploited socially, economically, and politically for centuries.
Dalits cannot survive in human society; they have been residing outside the village, dependent on lesser levels of work and have lived as “untouchables.”
This exploitation results from discrimination based on Hindu society’s age-old caste hierarchical system. The main objective of the Dalit movement was to build an aura in the Indian society based on social equality. In sociological studies of the Dalit movement, the dominant trend sees Dalit protest as an unavoidable consequence of an ideologist Hindu tradition with thick prejudice towards Dalits.Â
As a result, it is assumed that the movement is confined to advancing in economic, civic, and political spheres within the present order rather than revolutionising that society. This has hampered the understanding of the movement.
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Who is a Dalit?
A group or groups of people that are suppressed, boycotted, broken, or exploited in social structures are termed as Dalits.
Dalits are the people who make up the last caste division according to the Varnasrama Theory. This is the traditional definition of Dalit, as provided by many historians. The Dalits are the individuals who fall beneath this category, according to the Indian Constitution’s Reserved castes.
Dalits (ex-untouchables), who the so-called upper castes have mercilessly oppressed, fall outside the Varnasrama doctrine and are labelled as outcasts in pre-independence India. India gained freedom, but the Dalits were refused to experience the right to live a normal, equally treated life. This concept of equality spawned the Dalit Movement in India as a fightback against the lengthy prevailing injustices committed against them. The Dalit movement is a battle to challenge the upper castes’ socio-cultural predominance.
However, the name Dalit would imply ‘not one of us.’ Only one caste exists, and it refers to the human being abused economically, politically, socially, and in other aspects of life by the country’s traditions.
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Wrong Treatment of Dalits in the Society
The Dalits are deprived of all the basic resources in social, political life, and economics which opened a way for great oppression and degradation. The primary reason for the Dalit’s deteriorated status is the caste system that leads to the curse of untouchability, monopoly of resources, and monopoly of knowledge. Not only are Dalits extremely impoverished, but more than half of Dalits live below the poverty line, compared to less than 1/3rd of the population.Â
Treatment of Dalit Women
While Dalit women face the same gender discrimination issues as their upper-caste colleagues, they also face different issues. Dalit women are the most affected, and they face three types of oppression: class, caste, and gender. In Today’s World, Dalit women suffer from extremely low literacy and education levels, high reliability on wage labor, discrimination in employment and salaries, a high concentration of unskilled, low-paid, and dangerous manual labor, violence, and sexual exploitation, and are victims of many sorts of superstitions.Â
The very predicament of Dalit women may be traced back to the Vedic period. They must work as maids or bonded laborers, where they experience sexual harassment from upper caste males, or society would convert them into prostitutes.
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Dalit Movement
Dalit movement is an organized collective action of groups or lowers caste people against the upper-class people and their thought process on Brahamical thoughts to maintain an aura of empowerment and equality in the Indian society.
The Dalit movement was a socially based movement aiming at replacing the age-old hierarchical Indian culture with democratic values of liberty, equal treatment, social justice, etc. started very earlier, grew serious in the year 1970, and is now gaining traction.
The foundations of the Dalit movement are the product of centuries of anger in their hearts caused by the brutal deeds of India’s higher castes. Dalits were deprived of higher mental training and were prohibited from social-economic and political positions since they were assigned the duty of servicing the other three Varnas, all the Non-Dalits.
The division of labour further led to the division of labourers that worked, which was based on inequality and exploitation. The caste system degraded Dalit lives into a diseased state in which jobs were transformed into castes. The Shudras were looked upon poorly by the society’s higher classes.
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Conclusion
Untouchability has been outlawed, but unfair practices have not. Today, wearing nice clothing is not banned, but getting a decent job is. Today, socially and politically based structures of the society, in the view of reform and social betterment, set up one group against the other, creating hostility and maintaining the sense of disapproval from the past. Education is the only way to overcome such prejudice. Thus, the social reform movement will only succeed if all the Dalits unite and fight for equal rights. However, they must realise that the caste, that is, mostly popped up in people’s minds, can never be eliminated. Therefore, here, the social transformation would tell us that the abolition of discrimination-based practices and the attainment of rights are both required for the uprisal of society’s majorly disadvantaged group, the Dalits.
This module talks about the importance of the concept of the Dalit movement in the field of Sociology, the Dalit movement in India, what is Dalit movement is, and various other concepts related to the Dalit movement in the field of sociology.
