Krithika Srinivasan, an expert on human-dog interactions and public health, writes that ‘pariah dogs’ were probably a type kept by the Paraiyar, now a Scheduled Caste in Tamil Nadu.

These were the castes that we today call Dalits, she writes. “By the 1890s, the caste name paraiyar was anglicised to pariah (whence the English term ‘pariah’) , and was used as an inclusive term by ...