Are We Willing to Listen to the Person Kept Outside?
By CA.S. Muralidharan, Business Mentor and Thought Leader
A hymn is sung inside a temple. A teacher explains its meaning. Outside stands a devotee who believes in the same God but is forbidden to enter.
For centuries, that distance could be defended as part of a sacred social order. The person outside might have heard the chant, but could not always learn it, explain it or cross the threshold. To understand this history, we must listen to those who preserved India’s religious traditions. We must listen just as carefully to those denied a place within them.
Today, the question has acquired another urgency. India aspires to become Viksit Bharat by 2047. What would “developed” mean if a child’s birth still affects whose ability is recognised, whose enterprise receives support, or whose voice is heard when decisions are made?
How did the gate come to be closed?
The Vedas are four ancient collections: the Rigveda, Samaveda, Yajurveda and Atharvaveda. They contain hymns, chants, ritual formulas and reflections on life and the universe. They took shape across generations and were preserved through exacting oral instruction. Traditional belief holds that the rishis heard sacred knowledge; historical study examines the poets and schools that composed, collected and transmitted it. (vedicheritage.gov.in, vedicheritage.gov.in, ich.unesco.org)
Learning to recite the Vedas accurately demanded years of discipline. But over time, the question of how to preserve the tradition became bound to the question of who was entitled to learn it. Later rules linked formal Vedic study to upanayana, an initiation prescribed for boys of the Brahmin, Kshatriya and Vaishya varnas. Shudras were excluded from that prescribed route, while women’s access was restricted in many later traditions. The rules did not reserve all Vedic learning for Brahmins alone. They were nevertheless unequal. (sacred-texts.com, sacred-texts.com)
The Purusha Sukta in the Rigveda names four varnas through the image of a cosmic person. It does not prescribe every later restriction on education, work or social contact. Subsequent texts went further. Passages of the Manusmriti, for instance, assigned Shudras subordinate duties and placed certain other communities outside village life. Such prescriptions were not a single law code enforced uniformly across India. Yet they could give religious authority to inherited inequality. (sacred-texts.com, sacred-texts.com, sacred-texts.com)
A boundary around specialised learning had become something much larger: a judgment about human standing.
At Vaikom in Kerala, oppressed communities had to campaign in the 1920s for the right to use roads near a temple. Caste and economic pressure also bound some communities to handling human waste, while the society that demanded this labour treated its workers as impure. The injustice reached the road, the well, the school, the workplace and the home. (kottayam.gov.in, hrw.org)
We cannot dismiss these practices as a harmless division of labour that somehow went astray. Religious claims, inherited occupation, land and local power reinforced one another. Nor was every instance a simple encounter between a Brahmin and a non-Brahmin. Locally dominant non-Brahmin castes could also enforce exclusion against Dalit communities.
Those who challenged it from within
The tradition also contains voices that questioned the closed gate. In the Chandogya Upanishad, Satyakama Jabala cannot identify his paternal lineage. He speaks truthfully to a prospective teacher, who accepts him. The story cannot prove that ancient education was open to everyone. It does, however, ask whether truthfulness and spiritual aspiration matter more than descent. (wisdomlib.org)
Centuries later, Ramanuja gave that question enduring force within Sri Vaishnavism. Building on the Tamil Alvars’ devotional hymns, he taught a path centred on Narayana’s grace, devotion and surrender. Spiritual teaching in Tamil could reach people who had no access to formal Vedic Sanskrit study. (iep.utm.edu, academic.oup.com)
A celebrated account says that Ramanuja publicly shared a sacred mantra he had been told to guard, accepting the consequences if others could benefit. Traditions also remember his respect for Dhanurdasa, a devotee of lower social standing, and associate him with wider participation in worship at Melkote. These stories come largely from later devotional biographies; we cannot independently verify every detail. Their challenge remains clear: if God’s grace is available to every soul, who has the right to keep the way to God for a few? (cambridge.org, hindupedia.com, academic.oup.com)
Ramanuja did not abolish every traditional distinction concerning Vedic study. His reform lay especially in the place he gave devotion, surrender and Tamil teaching. Others challenged inherited rank in different ways. Basavanna and the Sharanas honoured work and contested caste boundaries. Chokhamela expressed both devotion to Vitthal and the pain of exclusion. Ravidas imagined a society free of inherited humiliation. Sri Narayana Guru consecrated a Shiva shrine at Aruvippuram despite conventions reserving such authority for Brahmins. (academic.oup.com, en.wikisource.org, books.google.com, keralatourism.org)
Each raised a deeper question. May everyone pray? May everyone enter? May everyone teach and lead? Can everyone live and work without birth deciding their worth?
When people sought another path
Some people concluded that reform from within would never give them the dignity they sought. Religious conversion became, for some, an act of faith and an assertion of freedom.
The clearest example is B. R. Ambedkar. Having experienced caste discrimination and argued for years against the authority behind it, he embraced Buddhism with many followers at Nagpur in 1956. This was more than a private change of belief. It was a public refusal to accept an identity assigned an inferior place, and the building of a new religious community around dignity. (ambedkarfoundation.nic.in, academic.oup.com)
Other Dalit communities embraced Christianity. Their histories include faith, education, community organisation and the hope of escaping degrading social relations. The reasons varied by place and period; a conversion cannot be reduced to one motive. Historians also record conversions to Sikhism and Islam among communities seeking different religious and social possibilities. Sikh teachings rejected caste distinctions, although caste shaped some later social practice among Sikhs. (academic.oup.com, academic.oup.com, cambridge.org)
We must be especially careful with a sweeping claim that lower-caste Hindus converted to Islam en masse solely to escape caste. Historian Richard Eaton’s work on Bengal and Punjab challenges that explanation for those regions, placing religious change within longer histories of settlement, agriculture and local religious communities. Caste oppression was a motive in some people’s choices; it cannot explain every Muslim community’s origins. (experts.arizona.edu, experts.arizona.edu)
Nor did changing religion always remove caste from social life. Caste identities and discrimination can persist among Indian Christians, Muslims and Sikhs despite the egalitarian teachings many find in those faiths. Conversion could offer spiritual self-respect, solidarity and new opportunity without automatically dissolving the inequalities surrounding a family. (academic.oup.com, pewresearch.org, academic.oup.com)
This makes conversion a serious message to the society a person left. It says, in effect: I sought dignity here and could not find enough of it. We should hear that message without questioning anyone’s freedom to believe differently. The purpose of confronting caste is equal dignity for every person, whether they remain Hindu, adopt another faith or profess none.
Conversion has also not fundamentally changed India’s overall religious composition in recent decades. Pew Research Center’s survey found that about 98% of Indian adults identified with the religion in which they were raised. The significance of Ambedkar’s conversion cannot be measured only by its effect on population shares. (pewresearch.org)
The unfinished work of reform
India is not alone in confronting inherited exclusion. The United States ended slavery and legal segregation, yet Black families continue to face large economic gaps. South Africa ended apartheid and held an election open to all races in 1994, yet the distribution of income still bears the marks of that history. Japan abolished the old inferior legal status of Buraku communities in 1871, but later needed further measures against continuing prejudice. These systems differ profoundly in origin and operation. They share one lesson: a law can open a gate long before the effects of exclusion disappear. (federalreserve.gov, gov.za, statssa.gov.za, japaneselawtranslation.go.jp)
India has made real progress. Untouchability is prohibited, and research finds convergence in education and occupations between upper castes and Scheduled Castes and Tribes since the 1980s. Affirmative action has helped targeted students enter higher education, including better-quality engineering colleges in one major study. These gains matter. (constitutionofindia.net, warwick.ac.uk, swlb1.aeaweb.org)
But the economic cost of remaining barriers also matters. An August 2026 working paper models the higher entry costs and tighter finance faced by entrepreneurs from historically disadvantaged castes. It estimates that these barriers reduce output by 6%. That is a modelled estimate of particular barriers, not a measure of every loss caused by caste throughout India’s history. It does, however, show what may happen when capable founders cannot obtain the same chance to start and grow a business. (bse.eu)
The cost begins earlier. In an experiment in India, teachers gave slightly lower marks to otherwise identical examination papers when the papers were assigned a lower-caste identity. If a child’s work is judged through a social label, opportunity is diminished before the labour market even begins. (benny.aeaweb.org)
What would Viksit Bharat require?
A developed India needs roads, schools, technology, investment and productive enterprises. It also needs every person’s ability to be recognised and used. The Viksit Bharat vision itself speaks of inclusive development and empowering citizens to realise their aspirations. Taking that promise seriously means asking who still cannot make use of the opportunities that already exist. (niti.gov.in, niti.gov.in)
Listening to the person kept outside must therefore be more than an expression of sympathy. It means hearing students about treatment in classrooms; workers about hiring and safety; entrepreneurs about credit, customers and networks; and families about access to housing, public services and justice. It means allowing those affected to help shape the institutions that serve them, and checking whether outcomes improve.
If a talented child is underestimated, India loses part of its future skill. If an able founder cannot obtain finance because of inherited disadvantage, India loses a possible enterprise. If a citizen cannot trust a school, workplace or public office to treat them fairly, India loses something still harder to measure: confidence that the country belongs equally to all.
Gandhi fought untouchability while seeking reform within Hindu society. Ambedkar argued that its cruelties could not be fully ended while inherited hierarchy retained its authority. His decision to embrace Buddhism made clear how high the stakes were. A person may cease asking to be admitted through a gate whose keepers continue to question their worth. (ccnmtl.columbia.edu, ccnmtl.columbia.edu, ambedkarfoundation.nic.in)
By 2047, India may be far wealthier. But wealth alone cannot tell us whether it has become developed in the fullest sense. We must ask whether birth still narrows a child’s future, whether dignity depends on social rank, and whether the people most affected have a voice in changing the system.
The person kept outside was never silent. They prayed, wrote, worked, organised, converted, challenged and built new institutions. The question is whether we are willing to hear what they have been saying—and share the power to act on it.
