Anticaste movement defined Brahminism as imitation infection, not Brahmins as people

Evidence

The towns the Bhakti poet-saints dreamed of—Beghampura, Pandharpur, Premnagar—had one thing in common. They all existed in a time and space that was liberated from the bonds of Brahminism. Brahminism was the term that the anticaste movement preferred over ‘Hinduism’. By Brahminism, they didn’t mean Brahmins as a caste or a community. They meant the domino effect, what Ambedkar called the “infection of imitation”, that the caste that first “enclosed” itself—the Brahmins—set off. “Some closed the door,” he wrote, “others found it closed against them.” — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 131

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies the crucial distinction: ‘Brahminism’ mean the infectious imitation of enclosure, not Brahmins as a community — a key conceptual precision for Ambedkar studies.