Upliftment of Depressed Classes

Caste hierarchy told millions of Indians which wells they could not drink from and which temples they could not enter, long before any British law touched the question. This topic follows the fight against that hierarchy — from Jyotirao Phule's Satyashodhak Samaj to Dr. Ambedkar's confrontation with Gandhi at the Poona Pact — and ends at Article 17 of the Constitution, which finally made untouchability itself an offence.

In two minutes

The movement to uplift India's depressed classes ran from Phule's nineteenth-century challenge to Brahmin dominance, through Ambedkar's direct-action campaigns for temple entry and water rights, to the Poona Pact of 1932 and the constitutional abolition of untouchability after independence.

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