Source library

The full CAD, searchable — the primary source for the /making page.

All 17 volumes, free to read.

BAWS volume PDFs, conveniently organised.

Full text of judgments, including Indra Sawhney (1992) and M. Siddiq v. Mahant Suresh Das (2019).

Official up-to-date text with amendments.

The literacy series (1901–2011) and the historical census reports. The 2027 census will count caste for the first time since 1931.

The last full caste census — the baseline every later caste estimate and the reservation architecture rest on. Hutton's report renamed the 'depressed classes' the 'exterior castes', the term that became Scheduled Castes. Digitised, public domain.

The literacy figures used in the two-codes education chart.

242 communities; BC 56.3%, SC 17.4%, ST 10.5%, forward 15.8%. Published under Publications → SEEEPC.

Released 2 Oct 2023 (BC+EBC 63%, SC 20%, ST 1.7%, General 15.5%). No single official portal; this aggregates the primary figures.

The 30 April 2025 decision to count caste in the next national census.

Conducted 2015, tabled in Cabinet April 2025 but never officially released — which is why the site tags its findings [Debated] and does not quote its numbers.

The standard social history of the lower orders to c. 600 CE — how the Dharmaśāstra fixed the Shudra outside the twice-born who alone received the sacred thread and the Veda. In copyright; cited, not reproduced.

The Chinese pilgrim's account of Nalanda (c. 637 CE) — monastic learning admitted by examination, not birth: the śramaṇa alternative to the Brahmanical monopoly on the Veda.

An outside witness at 1030: the Brahmins guard the Vedic sciences; the Shudra and outcaste are forbidden even to hear them — Gautama's molten-tin rule still operating a thousand years on.

With R. K. Mookerji's Ancient Indian Education: Brahmanical and Buddhist (1947), the standard account of the two classical systems — the Vedic gate and the monastic opening.

The 'Magna Carta of English education in India' — repudiated Macaulay's downward-filtration, committed the state (on paper) to graded mass and vernacular education, and founded the education departments and first universities. Promise ran ahead of delivery.

The Empire's first great education review — Phule's memorandum for free compulsory lower-caste schooling, and recommendations to draw the depressed classes in: a state commission recommending admission of castes that had been barred.

The maktab-and-madrasa channel of the Sultanate — Firoz Shah's colleges and the scholars they drew — running alongside, but never touching, the birth-gated Brahmanical tol.

Vernacular devotional verse (Kabir tr. Tagore; Ravidas & Kabir in the Ādi Granth) — the literacy the low-caste and untouchable built in the spoken tongue because Sanskrit learning was closed to them. Ambedkar judged it dignity-within-caste, not abolition.

The classical Tamil corpus — some 2,300 poems by ~500 poets of many trades, Brahmins present but not dominant — a literary tradition parallel to Sanskrit and, at its root, broader (dating per Kamil Zvelebil). The legendary 'three Sangam academies' are a later medieval tale, not a datable institution.

India's first reservation — the Justice Party government apportioning public posts across communities, twenty-nine years before the Constitution. The device the new code made national, pioneered in the south out of an education-and-office grievance.

The standard, freely-available scholarly history of colonial education — the frame for Macaulay, Wood, Hunter and Hartog.

The founding document of the Non-Brahmin movement, citing Brahmin monopoly of colonial education and public service.

Ambedkar likens the Depressed Classes' emancipation to the Exodus. Ambedkar's writings are public domain in India since 2017; held in period newspaper archives.

Brahmins (~3% of the Presidency's population) held 55% of deputy-collector, 82.3% of sub-judge and 72.6% of district-munsif posts — concretely, 15 of 18 permanent sub-judges and 93 of 123 munsifs. Drawn from testimony before the Public Services Commission (1912–13) and compiled in Irschick (1969); charted on the reservation essay as the pre-reservation baseline. The separate year-by-year salary-band clipping remains corroborating-only until its primary reference is confirmed.

The public-domain translation against which verse numbers are checked before display.

The Company's own survey of indigenous schooling in north India. Cited on the education essay for its caste breakdown of pupils and teachers — broad Shudra and some low-caste attendance at the elementary level.

The caste-wise school data the 'caste never barred education' argument rests on (~24% twice-born, ~65% Shudra at elementary level) — and the same tables showing higher learning (theology, law) as a Brahmin near-monopoly. The underlying 1822–25 survey is public-domain government record; Dharampal's 1983 compilation is in copyright, so we cite figures to the survey and link the archived full text.

The charter of colonial English education — a thin class 'Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste,' not mass literacy. The new ceiling atop the old one.

Ambedkar's earliest documented constitutional demand — that the Depressed Classes be a distinct represented category. The 1919 bookend to States and Minorities (1947). Public domain in India.

Ambedkar's own account of untouchability, including the separate gunny sack and the 'no peon, no water' school memory. Public domain in India; quoted on the education essay as first-person period testimony.

Ambedkar's memorandum to the Fundamental Rights Sub-Committee, 15 March 1947 — a 'mini-constitution' of rights and safeguards for the Scheduled Castes, insisting that declaring rights is useless without remedies to enforce them. The hinge from grievance to the drafted remedy.

The primary source cited (and scrutinised) for the Nalanda claim.

For the Gandhi–Ambedkar record, in his own words.

Critical edition and translation of the Mānava-Dharmaśāstra; the modern text-critical benchmark.

On Ambedkar's politics and thought.

The standard biography.

On the making of the republic.

The colonial-construction-of-caste thesis, engaged on the Objections page.

On the Non-Brahmin movement and the Madras public-service figures.

Display / titles — the historic legal-document face.

Body — a serif built for screen reading.

Citations & tags — so a legal reference reads like a line of code.