Totems, Broken Men, and the Roots of Untouchability: An Anthropological Reflection on Ambedkar’s Insights

The study of totems in India, unlike in many other anthropological traditions, has long been neglected. This neglect owes much to a dominant perspective advanced by colonial administrators, notably the Census Commissioner, who insisted that the fundamental unit of Hindu social organization was the sub-caste, bound by endogamy. Yet, as Dr. B. R. Ambedkar sharply pointed out, nothing could be further from the truth. For him, the real unit of Hindu society was not the sub-caste but the family, governed not by endogamy but by exogamy.

In this sense, the Hindu family is essentially tribal in its organization. In northern India especially, marriage rules are shaped by kula and gotra, which operate as equivalents of the totemic system in so-called “primitive” societies. Caste and sub-caste, Ambedkar argued, were superimposed later, as secondary layers of social order. Beneath them lay the older tribal system, still visible in the exogamous rules that structured kinship and family life.

Tribesmen and Broken Men: A Universal Phenomenon

Ambedkar’s reflections push us deeper into the anthropological past of Indian society, offering a perspective more penetrating than most Eastern or Western scholars of his time. Drawing comparisons with the Fuidhirs of Ireland and the Alltudes of Wales, he demonstrated that the phenomenon of the “untouchables” in India was not an isolated cultural peculiarity. Rather, it was an expression of a universal pattern:

1. Early village settlements consisted of two parts—one inhabited by a cohesive tribal community, the “village proper,” and the other by outsiders or fragmented groups.

2. These outsiders—what Ambedkar called the Broken men were alien to the tribal bond, lacking rights of full membership.

3. Their exclusion from the tribal nucleus was not based on race but on their status as strangers, fugitives, or people detached from their ancestral group.

In this sense, untouchability did not originate as a matter of ritual impurity. Instead, it grew out of the structural division between tribesmen and Broken men, the latter forming a parallel society, marginalized both spatially and socially.

The Role of the Brahmins in Shaping Exclusion

The Brahmins’ arrival intensified this structural divide. Their penetration into tribal society was possible only through religion, which gave them a powerful but precarious foothold. Had they extended their social control to include the Broken men, it would have provoked resistance from the partially aryanised tribes who themselves excluded these outsiders. The solution was strategic: the Brahmins reinforced the marginalization of Broken men, gradually recasting them as untouchables.

This exclusion hardened over time, particularly when the Broken men began to adopt religions outside the Brahmanical fold, notably Buddhism and Jainism. In this way, hostility towards them deepened into outright social ostracism.

Ambedkar’s Key Propositions on Untouchability

Ambedkar’s formulation on the origins of untouchability is as radical as it is illuminating:

1. No racial difference separates Hindus from untouchables.

2. The original divide was between Tribesmen and Broken men, not between superior and inferior races.

3. Untouchability has no occupational basis either.

4. Its roots lie in two elements: (a) contempt for the Broken men, and (b) their continued practice of beef-eating after others abandoned it.

5. Untouchables must be distinguished from the Impure, a confusion made by orthodox Hindu writers.

6. While the Impure class arose around the time of the Dharmasutras, untouchability crystallized much later, post–400 A.D.

This anthropological reading positions untouchability not as a timeless essence of Hindu society but as a historical and structural product of shifting social relations.

Beef-Eating, Buddhism, and Brahmanical Strategy

The contest between Brahmanism and Buddhism was not merely doctrinal—it was deeply social and material. Buddhism’s ethical opposition to animal sacrifice resonated with agrarian populations, who were uneasy with the slaughter of cows and bullocks. The Brahmins, once staunch consumers of beef (as evidenced in the Aitareya Brahmana and even in Manu’s injunctions), began to renounce it. This shift was less a spiritual transformation than a tactical maneuver—a means of regaining prestige and social supremacy.

In time, Brahmins developed an elaborate vegetarian cuisine, embedding their authority in the very domain of food. Meanwhile, many Broken men retained their association with meat, particularly beef, reinforcing their stigmatized difference. Here, food became a cultural battlefield, where symbolic purity and exclusion were codified into daily practice.

Buddhism, Jainism, and the Parallel Society

Between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D., India experienced its most tumultuous cultural transformation. Buddhism and Jainism, rising as popular movements, directly challenged Brahmanical supremacy. Their rejection of animal sacrifice and emphasis on ethical conduct created a mass following, unsettling the Brahmins.

The backlash was fierce. Ambedkar interprets the murder of Brihadratha Maurya by Pushyamitra as a decisive turning point—the beginning of a Brahmanical counter-revolution. Later, Shankara’s campaign against Buddhism ensured its disappearance as a major religious force in India.

Yet, from an anthropological perspective, the decline of Buddhism was not only political. Primitive Buddhism lacked the anthropomorphic conception of God that Hinduism provided. Its rationalism, while ethically profound, failed to meet the psychological and social needs of large communities.

The Anthropological Significance

Ambedkar’s insights compel us to rethink the origins of caste and untouchability. The Hindu family, with its exogamous rules of kula and gotra, reveals a tribal substrate. Untouchability, far from being an eternal religious sanction, emerges as the historical outcome of exclusionary practices directed at the Broken men, later reinforced by Brahmanical strategies of food, ritual, and ideology.

This framework not only situates Indian society within comparative anthropology—by connecting it to patterns found in Ireland and Wales—but also grounds the question of untouchability in a broader human phenomenon: how communities define insiders and outsiders, purity and pollution, kin and stranger.

In Ambedkar’s hands, the anthropological lens becomes more than a tool of analysis. It becomes a weapon of critique, exposing the constructedness of social hierarchies and reclaiming the voices of those rendered Broken.