Introduction

The introduction raises two questions: why is there no physical violence against the Brahmins, and why are jatis as coherent groups able to raise against the empirical Brahmins and non-empirical Brahmins against the practice of untouchability? I argue that untouchability is not the off-shoot or extreme manifestation of the notions of purity and pollution. I also discuss Dipankar Gupta’s idea of discrete jatis and assert that untouchability is the unifying element of these discrete jatis. The introduction details how the works of Patrick Olivelle, Veena Das, and Sundar Sarukkai bring the sanyasi tradition into the discourse on caste. It also differentiates the relations between social groups based on the notions of purity and pollution on the one hand, and based on untouchability on the other.