Revision summary
Gandhi treated varna as four duties, not as ranked jati or untouchability. He called untouchability a sin and organised the Harijan Sevak Sangh after 1932. Temple entry and the Poona Pact were his political field; Ambedkar still rejected birth-varna. Later Gandhi accepted inter-caste marriage and attacked caste hierarchy more sharply. The ethical gain is real; the structural limit is that hereditary calling can freeze labour.
Model answer
Introduction
Mohandas Gandhi treated varna as a moral division of labour, not as the thousands of ranked jatis of everyday Hindu society. An evaluation must praise his attack on untouchability and still mark the limit of a birth-linked varna ideal.
Body
What Gandhi defended
- In Young India and related writings he described varna as four hereditary callings — teaching, defence, trade, and labour — meant to reduce greed by fixing duty, not to rank human worth.
- He separated this ideal from jati fragmentation and from untouchability, which he called a sin and a blot, not a Vedic necessity.
- The Harijan campaign, the Harijan Sevak Sangh (1932), temple-entry satyagrahas, and his fasts against separate electorates after the Communal Award of 1932 show that civic equality of the ‘Harijan’ was his practical programme.
- He argued that a scavenger’s work was as sacred as a Brahmin’s prayer if done as duty, which attacked ritual pollution even while it kept occupational labels.
Change and critique
- Early Gandhi was cautious on inter-dining and inter-marriage; later, especially in the 1940s, he blessed inter-caste marriage and said caste as hierarchy must go.
- B. R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste (1936) and the Poona Pact (1932) expose the gap: legal and temple entry did not dissolve varna as birth, which Ambedkar treated as the root of graded inequality.
- Gandhi’s village constructive programme trained sanitation and spinning, but it did not design land reform or job reservation as the main caste remedy.
- Evaluation therefore splits: as ethics, Gandhi desacralised untouchability; as social structure, a hereditary varna model still risked freezing labour and status.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD G[Gandhi] --> V[Varna as duty] G --> U[Untouchability as sin] U --> H[Harijan Sevak Sangh 1932] V --> A[Ambedkar critique] H --> E[Moral gain structural limit]
Conclusion
Gandhi’s varna was an ideal of duty without pollution, and his Harijan work made untouchability a national political issue. The evaluation is mixed because a birth-linked fourfold order never fully met Ambedkar’s demand to end caste as a system of power.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Write a critical note on the Foreign Policy of Mussolini, the leader of Fascism in Italy.
Next question in the 2020 paper (Q3). View answer →
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Did Gandhi support the caste system as practised?
No. He attacked jati pride and untouchability. He did, for a long time, defend an ideal fourfold varna of duty, which is the point of evaluation.
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Did Gandhi and Ambedkar agree on varna?
No. Gandhi hoped to purify Hindu society by ending pollution. Ambedkar wanted to exit caste as a birth hierarchy, including through law and later conversion.
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