ABSTRACT
The government of Gujarat has been organizing a programme to train Scheduled Caste (SC) priests since 2000–2001. The programme to train Garo priests shows how the Garo caste remains a distinct entity, enjoying the highest ritual status in the hierarchy of SCs in Gujarat, and the government supports the status. While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Gujarat might well have been motivated to spread Hindutva by instituting such a programme, sanskritization itself has been a fundamental social process among SCs, and the Garo priests have been functioning as Sanskritic priests since long before the BJP government came to power. The social facts behind the programme provide one more reminder, particularly to the social scientists, that the category SC or Dalit is highly differentiated, officially including more than a thousand different major castes in India as a whole, arranged in hierarchies in their respective localities.
