Namasudra (), earlier known as Chandal, is an Avarna Bengali Hindu community originating from eastern and central Bengal. The term Chandal or Chandala is usually considered to be a slur. They were traditionally engaged in fishing and as boatmen, and later in cultivation. They lived outside the four-tier ritual varna system and thus were outcastes.
Namasudra (), earlier known as Chandal, is an Avarna Bengali Hindu community originating from eastern and central Bengal. The term Chandal or Chandala is usually considered to be a slur. They were traditionally engaged in fishing and as boatmen, and later in cultivation. They lived outside the four-tier ritual varna system and thus were outcastes.
== Etymology == There is a dearth of discussion as to the etymology of the word namasudra in pre-nineteenth-century Bengali literature and the period of origin of the word is also undetermined. Several theories have been suggested but there is no broad consensus supporting any of them.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).