Dalit, Harijan, Scheduled Caste, Untouchable — which word is right?
Four words, four different kinds of thing. Only one is neutral, and none is simply a synonym for the others.
Where each word comes from
- Untouchable is the descriptive term for the ritual position: a person whose touch was held to pollute. This site uses it when describing that position, because it is the only word that names the thing being described.
- Depressed Classes was the official British term of the early twentieth century — the wording of the Southborough Committee, the Round Table Conferences and the Poona Pact. It appears here only where the period record uses it.
- Scheduled Castes is the legal term, from the Government of India Act of 1935 and the schedule made under it listing the communities entitled to reservation. It is still the term in Indian law.
- Harijan — children of God — was Gandhi's coinage, taken up from 1933 and given to the weekly he edited under that name.
- Dalit is Marathi and Sanskrit for broken, or ground down. In use in the nineteenth century, it was made a political self-description by the Dalit Panthers in the nineteen-seventies. It is a word chosen by the people it names.
The contested one is Harijan, and the objection is not that it is impolite. It is a benediction handed down: it names the group by the pity of the people above it, leaves the arrangement that produced the group undisturbed, and asks the person named to be grateful. Ambedkar rejected it and went on rejecting it. The word never entered the Constitution — which abolishes untouchability in Article 17 and speaks of Scheduled Castes in Articles 341 and 366 — and governments later instructed their departments to stop using it. Gandhi did not intend it as condescension and said so — his position was that the Untouchables were Hindus and the language should say they belonged. That is a real argument, and it is the same one that ran through the Poona Pact: whether a group can be named, spoken for and repaired from the outside by people acting in good faith. The site does not settle it, here or anywhere.
In practice: Dalit is the ordinary respectful word in Indian English today, and the one most of the people described would choose. Scheduled Caste is correct in any legal or statistical context. Untouchable fits the historical position itself. Harijan is best avoided unless you are quoting Gandhi, or Ambedkar's objection to him.
In the Journey: A party, a war, and a labour portfolio, 1936–1946