BELGIUM, January 1, 2016 (this is an academic paper by Jakob De Roover Ghent University, Belgium): Some excerpts: What we can now conclude is that the idea that there were two distinct communities or “communities of communities” in Indian society, namely Caste Hindus and Depressed Classes (or Untouchables or Scheduled Castes or Harijans or Dalits) did not correspond to any empirically retrievable structure in this society. There never were coherent common properties that allowed people to recognize these as two distinct communities across India. Thus, no research or investigation could ever show that these two existed as communities in the social world of India.
We cannot fully unearth the conceptual foundations of the opposition between Caste Hindus and Depressed Classes without dissecting a centuries-old European Orientalist account about India. During the eighteenth and nineteenth century, European scholars, missionaries and colonial officials had developed a standard account about Hinduism and its caste system. By the early twentieth century, this account had achieved the status of a factual description of Indian culture and society. Yet, if we look at the conceptual building blocks that form the core of this account, these cannot be understood without the Christian-theological framework that guided the Europeans in their reasoning about India.
See “source” above for this long paper.