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This article revisits the promulgation of the Scheduled Caste Order 1950, appended to Article 341 of the Indian Constitution. The Order provides the list of Scheduled Castes (SCs) and sets the prerequisites for a series of robust entitlements to India's 'untouchable castes'. The Order of 1950, however, also serves as a dampener to the equality claims of low castes of non-Hindu denominations by precluding them from the entitlements that the SC status promises. The Order has been amended twice—in 1956 to include Sikh low castes and in 1990 to accommodate the neo-Buddhists. However, the untouchable convertees to Islam and Christianity continue to remain outside its purview. The article develops on the deliberations surrounding the promulgation of the Government Order of 1950 in the Constituent Assembly, subsequently in the Indian Parliament, in the courts and in the public domain. Through an analysis of the discussions and disputes around this question, it attempts to deconstruct the nationalist common sense on the question of inequality and caste among non-Hindus, its fears and anxieties regarding proselytisation and the emerging idea of nationhood and citizenship.

This article outlines two inter-related but distinct theoretical approaches to the study of Christianity and Social Class developed from the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The first is a model derived from Distinction (Bourdieu [1979] 1984), the second comes from Bourdieu's work on religious fields with a focus on the conversion of capital between different fields. The former, better known, approach has the potential to provide important insights, including identifying the affinity of different religious groups with different class locations; on the other hand, this would tell us little about the internal workings of religious communities; it is also unfortunately hampered by a lack of suitable data. The conception of fields and their inter-relations will not answer the questions about the affinity of particular class fragments for particular kinds of religiosity, but it does provide much keener insight into the operation of class within religious communities, by examining the conversion of different types of capital into religious capital. This is illustrated with an extended Bourdieusian hypothesis, a schematic outline that could be used as the starting point for empirical research on the operation of different kinds of capital in the Church of England.