Caste, Dharma, and the Image of God

On October 14, 1956, B.R. Ambedkar — the principal architect of India's constitution, a man with doctorates from Columbia and the London School of Economics, and a Dalit himself — led several hundred thousand followers in a mass conversion to Buddhism. He had spent over two decades trying to reform caste from inside Hinduism. He concluded, in the end, that caste was not a distortion of the tradition's texts. It was, in his reading, their structural core.

That verdict, from that particular man, is where this companion to the previous article on karma has to start.

Varna and Jati

Two systems travel under the single English word "caste." Varna is the older, fourfold classification described in the Rigveda's Purusha Sukta: Brahmins (priests and teachers), Kshatriyas (warriors and rulers), Vaishyas (merchants and farmers), and Shudras (laborers), pictured as proceeding from different parts of a cosmic being's body — mouth, arms, thighs, feet. Jati is the far more granular system of thousands of local, birth-based communities, tied to specific occupations and regions, that most people actually live inside day to day. Outside the fourfold varna system entirely stood a group excluded even from its bottom rung — historically labeled "untouchable," now self-identified as Dalit, meaning "broken" or "oppressed."

A Cosmology, Not Just a Social Order

The previous article in this series described karma's harder implication: present circumstances, on the classical account, are the ripened fruit of past-life action. Applied to birth, that logic gave caste something more powerful than custom or law — it gave caste a cosmology. Being born a Shudra, or outside the varna system altogether, was not arbitrary or unjust; it was earned, the exact moral consequence of a soul's own prior conduct.

🔯 Hindu Teaching: The Manusmriti, a Dharma Shastra codified in the early centuries CE, presents varna as woven into the created order itself, each class carrying its own dharma — its own proper duties, restrictions, and path to merit. Fulfilling the duties of one's own station faithfully, whatever that station is, was itself understood as a way of generating good karma toward a better rebirth. The system asked for acceptance of one's place, not despair over it.

That framing explains why caste proved so durable. It wasn't only enforced from outside by power; it was, for many centuries, believed from inside as justice.

Ambedkar's Verdict

Ambedkar's break with Mahatma Gandhi over exactly this question is one of the most consequential disagreements in modern Indian history. Gandhi held that Hinduism should be judged by its best followers rather than its worst, and that caste could be reformed away from within — he fought for Dalits' entry into temples and called himself "untouchable by choice." Ambedkar, born into the Mahar community and marked by caste discrimination from childhood, concluded that temple entry changed nothing structural. In his 1936 essay Annihilation of Caste, he argued that caste could not be removed without removing the religious doctrine that sustained it — because the doctrine, in his reading, wasn't an add-on to Hinduism. It was load-bearing.

Ambedkar spent nearly twenty years studying Christianity, Islam, and Sikhism before choosing Buddhism. He rejected Christianity specifically because he observed that caste consciousness had not disappeared among Indian Christians either, generations after their conversion. A faith that proclaims equality on paper and still sorts its own members by birth had, in his judgment, not actually solved the problem — only relocated it.

The Counter-Currents Within Hinduism

Ambedkar's verdict was not the only Hindu verdict on caste, and treating it as though it were would flatten a real internal history. The medieval Bhakti movement produced fierce critics of caste from inside the tradition centuries before Ambedkar. Ravidas, a 15th-century poet-saint born into a Chamar leather-working family classified as untouchable, preached that devotion, not birth, determined nearness to God, and envisioned an ideal city, Begampura, entirely free of caste distinction. His hymns drew followers from every caste in his own lifetime.

His legacy complicates the story further: forty-one of Ravidas's hymns found their most durable institutional home not within orthodox Hindu scripture but inside the Sikh Guru Granth Sahib, compiled by Guru Arjan a century after his death. A message of radical caste equality, born inside Hindu devotional practice, found firmer footing in a related but distinct tradition than in the one that produced it.

What the Image of God Offered — and Didn't Always Deliver

📖 "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." — Galatians 3:28 (ESV)

That claim is a large part of why Dalit conversion to Christianity has been a real, sustained historical movement, particularly from the colonial era onward: a theology in which every person bears God's image prior to and apart from any social station offered something karma-justified caste structurally could not — a dignity that wasn't earned, couldn't be forfeited, and didn't have to wait for a future birth to arrive.

Ambedkar's own observation has to stand as a check on that claim rather than an inconvenience to explain away. Caste consciousness has, at times and in places, persisted among Indian Christians too — a gap between what Galatians 3:28 declares and what some Christian communities have actually practiced. The doctrine is not the same thing as its consistent application, in any tradition. Naming that gap in Christianity's own historical record is a condition of naming it anywhere else.

What This Means for the Conversation

🌐 Cultural Context: Most Hindus a Western Christian will actually meet, especially in the diaspora, did not choose caste, do not defend it, and may find the subject raised as an accusation exhausting or unfair — caste is currently a live, contested political topic in the West as well as in India, and many Hindus feel unfairly stereotyped by it. This article traces a theological history. It is not a character reference on the person sitting across the table.

For the Christian working through this: don't raise caste as a debate point against a Hindu friend who has never defended it and likely opposes it as strongly as you do. Use this history differently — understand why karma theology could sustain caste for so long, and be ready, if the topic comes up, to name Christianity's own historical failures on this exact point before anyone else has to name them for you.

For the Hindu reader working through this: Ambedkar remains one of the sharpest internal critics Hinduism has ever produced, and Ravidas one of its most beloved. Neither verdict has to be the last word for any individual reader today. What's worth carrying forward from both is the question underneath their disagreement with the tradition they were born into: does a person's worth depend on birth, or does it not?

💬 Conversation Tip: If caste comes up at all, let your friend raise it first. If they do, Ambedkar's own story — a Hindu-born reformer whose search for equality eventually took him outside Hinduism entirely — is a far more respectful and more interesting starting point than any argument you could construct yourself.

Primary Sources Referenced: Rigveda 10.90 (Purusha Sukta) • Manusmriti • B.R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste (1936) • Ravidas, hymns in the Guru Granth Sahib • Galatians 3:26–29

Scholarly References: Christophe Jaffrelot, India's Silent Revolution: The Rise of the Lower Castes in North India (2003) • Gail Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution (1994) • Duncan B. Forrester, Caste and Christianity (1980) • Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (1998)

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.