# Is it shudras or harijans? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [July 22, 2000, 7:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-shudras-or-harijans/26454 "2000-07-22T07:50:13Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![silent\_rob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@silent\_rob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/silent_rob)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2000, 7:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-shudras-or-harijans/26454/1 "2000-07-22T07:50:13Z")
A couple of recent threads got me wondering this. Is the name shudra still used for the lowest caste in Hinduism? I thought Gandhi renamed them harijans (“children of God”) and in the 1948 the stigma of “untouchables” was abolished. Is shudra still the popular term used and the stigma is no more? Or is term harijan used? Or is the stigma of shudras being “untouchable” still common-place? ---
**Author:** ![tcburnett](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c5a1d2/32.png) [@tcburnett](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tcburnett)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2000, 11:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-shudras-or-harijans/26454/2 "2000-07-22T11:19:07Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by silent\_rob \* > \*\*A couple of recent threads got me wondering this. Is the name shudra still used for the lowest caste in Hinduism? I thought Gandhi renamed them harijans (“children of God”) and in the 1948 the stigma of “untouchables” was abolished. Is shudra still the popular term used and the stigma is no more? Or is term harijan used? Or is the stigma of shudras being “untouchable” still common-place? \*\* It depends upon whether you live in a Metropolitan area (read overcrowded slum) and have had experience with dollars. People in that situation tend to stifle their hereditary beliefs. Rubes in the country tend to cling to them. Same as anywhere else, including here. Gandhi was far enough ahead of his time to suffer the consequences of the illiterati. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [July 22, 2000, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-shudras-or-harijans/26454/3 "2000-07-22T22:31:50Z")
Slight terminology confusion here: sudras are the lowest of the four canonical Hindu major social groups or varnas: brahmana, ksatriya, vaisya, sudra. So sudras are **not** untouchable; that “distinction” is reserved for groups considered so degraded as to be outside the caste system entirely. Here’s an excerpt on the topic from Burton Stein’s _A History of India:_ > [@](#): > > By medieval times, if not before, groups who did not fit into the fourfold social and moral division—such as those whom British census officials later called tribal people […]—were deemed even less pure than shudras; some were deemed so impure as to be untouchable […] As forests were felled to make way for cultivation and pastures, hunters and shifting cultivators of forested places were forced into dependency upon landed households of shudra and higher standing. > > Why this dependence carried with it the degradation of untouchability is not obvious. It did not arise from cultivation as such, because all castes except brahmans were permitted to till the soil, and even brahmans could do so if life depended upon it. Rather, untouchability was explained in dharma texts as the result of practices considered polluting or else by generalization from captives taken in warfare, aliens without claims to the community protection enjoyed by others, who were reduced to such dependency. Persons and groups considered polluted for whatever reason were frequently prohibited from living in the main settlements of even shudra villages[…]. The modern legal designation for these lowest groups is “scheduled castes,” also called “dalits” (“oppressed”) or by Gandhi’s term “Harijan”. There are constitutional protections and affirmative action provisions for dalits, so many of them now have attained quite a high social status and of course are not treated as untouchable by most of those around them (though I’ve heard stories from Indian colleagues of striking examples of persistent anti-dalit prejudice). As **tcb** points out, this new flexibility doesn’t cut much ice for groups in more traditional patches of society. The same blend of mobility and tradition holds for non-dalits in the four varnas. Indian society is legally without caste restrictions, so theoretically anyone can be or do anything they choose; in practice, you still see areas dominated by members of the appropriate varna, so that scholars (and priests, of course) tend to be from brahmana families, career military officers from ksatriya ones, merchants in vaisya jatis, and servants and artisans among the sudras. So yes, the lowest varna still has the name (and often the traditional status) of “sudra”, but sudras technically rank above untouchables, now called “scheduled castes” or “dalits” more often than “Harijans.” ---
**Author:** ![Milton\_De\_La\_Warre](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e480ec/32.png) [@Milton\_De\_La\_Warre](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Milton_De_La_Warre)\ **Post date:** [July 24, 2000, 4:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-shudras-or-harijans/26454/4 "2000-07-24T16:34:30Z")
Most interesting. How “Dacoits” figure into this? I gather the term is applied to wandering banditti, who are not well thought of. Are they necessarily of this lowest caste, or is being a Dacoit considered more of an occupation (dishonorable, to be sure) rather than a social class/caste? ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [July 26, 2000, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-shudras-or-harijans/26454/5 "2000-07-26T22:31:37Z")
Good question, **JCH** , and hard to answer, for me at least. Here’s what Stein has to say about it: > [@](#): > > [The British] government did from time to time prohibit practices it considered particularly objectionable, such as sati, female infanticide and dacoity (_thagi_ [whence our “thug”]): the murder of travellers and theft of their valuables, including children, whose practitioners claimed for it the status of a caste occupation. So dacoits were considered, at least by themselves, to be a separate jati (probably not a high-caste one, although I wonder if some dacoit groups might have identified themselves with ksatriya warrior images). But _thagi_ is also described, especially in its inception, as a secret inter-caste religious fraternity that practiced crime as a devotional act. [This article](http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/yale/9.1roy.html) from the _Yale Journal of Criticism_ says: > [@](#): > > The thugs, as they are narrativized in nineteenth and twentieth-century colonial representations, were a cult of professional stranglers who preyed on travellers–though never on Englishmen–as an act of worship to the goddess Kali. They were represented as hereditary killers drawn from all regions, religions, classes, and castes, united by their devotion to Kali and the act of strangulation, which was, in this reading, quite literally sacralized. (Beware of reading the whole article if you are allergic to pomo jargon: it’s full of phrases like “to (re)cast it as a problem of impersonation/mimicry and the transactions of colonial reading”—igg.) Nowadays, dacoity seems to operate more like organized crime in the western world, and people get mixed up in it not because of jati obligations but because they want money or fell afoul of the law in a different way. Some famous dacoits of recent years are mentioned in [this article](http://news.sawaal.com/19-May-2000/National/12.htm). So dacoity and _thagi_ have been sometimes lumped into the same category, although _thagi_ is more about secret ritual murder and its practitioners at least in theory observed no caste distinctions during these rites, whereas dacoity seems more associated with ordinary banditry and even attained jati status. At present, ritual _thagi_ is AFAIK extinct, and dacoity is a more “modern” and caste-independent “profession” at least in urban India, although I bet that bands of “traditional” dacoits still holding up trains and buses in more remote areas are more likely to be part of hereditary criminal castes. And those castes are probably officially sudras, although I’d guess some of them might well have originated as dalit groups. Ram Ram. Can I go home now? 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![palashbiswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/b9bd4f/32.png) [@palashbiswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/palashbiswas)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2018, 6:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-shudras-or-harijans/26454/6 "2018-07-16T18:58:04Z")
Read [Quiz questions and answers](https://www.gkindia.in/general-knowledge-quiz-questions/)on [GK India](https://www.gkindia.in/). Here you can Find [Indian History gk](https://www.gkindia.in/ancient-indian-history-general-knowledge/), Geography gk, All Types of gk questions, [basic general knowledge questions and answers](https://goo.gl/Wuhww9), ---
**Author:** ![palashbiswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/b9bd4f/32.png) [@palashbiswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/palashbiswas)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2018, 7:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-shudras-or-harijans/26454/7 "2018-07-16T19:03:56Z")
[general knowledge quiz questions and answers](https://www.gkindia.in/general-knowledge-quiz-questions/) ---
**Author:** ![palashbiswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/b9bd4f/32.png) [@palashbiswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/palashbiswas)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2018, 7:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-shudras-or-harijans/26454/8 "2018-07-16T19:07:26Z")
[Quiz questions and answers](https://www.gkindia.in/general-knowledge-quiz-questions/) ---
**Author:** ![palashbiswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/b9bd4f/32.png) [@palashbiswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/palashbiswas)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2018, 7:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-shudras-or-harijans/26454/9 "2018-07-16T19:11:32Z")
[Indian History GK](https://www.gkindia.in/ancient-indian-history-general-knowledge/) [Basic general Knowledge](https://www.gkindia.in/200-basic-general-knowledge-questions-and-answers/) [GK India](https://www.gkindia.in/) [GK Questions and answers](https://www.gkindia.in/gk-questions-general-knowledge-quiz/) ---
**Author:** ![74westy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/74westy/32/3950_2.png) [@74westy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/74westy)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2018, 7:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-shudras-or-harijans/26454/10 "2018-07-16T19:13:25Z")
reported ---
**Author:** ![palashbiswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/b9bd4f/32.png) [@palashbiswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/palashbiswas)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2018, 7:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-shudras-or-harijans/26454/11 "2018-07-16T19:15:59Z")
[সাধারণ জ্ঞান প্রশ্ন ও উত্তর](http://www.bidrohi.in/gkindia/) [History gk in bangla](http://www.bidrohi.in/gkindia/history-general-knowledge-questions-in-bangla/) [Geography gk in bangla](http://bidrohi.in/gkindia/geography-general-knowledge-in-bengali-html/) ---
**Author:** ![palashbiswas](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/b9bd4f/32.png) [@palashbiswas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/palashbiswas)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2018, 7:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-it-shudras-or-harijans/26454/12 "2018-07-16T19:18:23Z")
[General knowledge quiz](https://www.gkindia.in/general-knowledge-quiz-questions/)