India, Its Life and Thought. John P. Jones
precluded from marrying together, and their possibilities of reciprocal entertainment would be limited to those products of the confectioners' shops into the composition of which water, the most fatal and effective vehicle of ceremonial impurity, had not entered. Fire purifies, water pollutes. It would follow in fact that they could eat chocolates and other sweetmeats together, but could not drink tea or coffee, and could only partake of ices if they were made without water and were served on metal, not porcelain, plates."
Mr. Risley might have added considerably to these restrictions and limitations without exhausting the catalogue.
Let us briefly enumerate those elements which enter into caste. The first and the most important is intermarriage within the caste. None except members of totemistic castes can, with impunity, look beyond the sacred borders of their own caste for conjugal bliss. So long as castes remain endogamous they will preserve their integrity, and their foundations will never be removed. This is the fons et origo of caste perpetuity. All other characteristics may pass away; if this remain, all is well with the organization. And it is this which remains with devilish pertinacity and mischief-working power in the infant Native Christian Church of India. It is this same extreme evil which the social reformers of India are trying to puncture. But all that they dare to struggle and hope for is the right of members of subdivisions of any caste to intermarry. A generation ago, there were 1886 divisions in the Brahman caste alone, no two of which could enjoy connubial or convivial privileges together. It is not up to the most sanguine reformer of India to seek that all Brahmans enjoy the right of intermarrying—he only asks that the divisions among the Brahmans may be reduced, and intermarriage may be sanctioned among subdivisions. Yet even this meagre quest is not likely to be gratified. This is not surprising, for the defenders of the system well know that if this stronghold of caste is at all weakened, the whole will speedily yield to modern attack. This, doubtless, is the reason why orthodox Hindus are so vehement in their opposition to any and all endeavour to remove the many disabilities and cruelties which the marriage regulations of the land inflict upon Hindu women. There is no land under the sun whose weaker sex suffer more from marital legislation than India; and yet the people can do nothing practically to remedy the crying evils of the same, simply because the mighty engine of caste is arrayed against them. Its perpetuity is linked closely with the resistance of all efforts at reform.
Next in importance to the connubial is the convivial legislation of caste. It is the business of every member of a caste to conserve the purity of his gens by eating only with his fellow-castemen. Under no circumstance can he inter-dine with those of a caste below his own. The dictates of caste in this matter are sometimes beyond understanding. Not only must a man eat with those of his own connection; he must be very scrupulous as to the source of the articles which he is about to eat; he must know who handled them, and especially who cooked them. Some articles of food, such as fruit, are not subject to pollution; while others, preëminently water, are to be very carefully guarded against the polluting touch of the lower castes. The writer has entered a railway car and accidentally touched a Brahman's water-pot under the seat, whereupon the disgusted owner seized the vessel and immediately poured out of the car window all its contents. It has been truly said that that monster of cruelty, Nana Sahib of Cawnpore, was able, without any violation of caste rules, to massacre many innocent English women and children at the time of the great Mutiny; but to drink a cup of water out of the hand of one of those tender victims of his treachery and rage would have been a mortal sin against caste, such as could be atoned for only in future births and by the fiery tortures of hell! The rationale of this interdiction is doubtless the desire to preserve the purity of caste blood. As food becomes a part of the body, and, as the Hindu thinks, of the life, it is imperative that all the members of a caste shall eat only the same kind of food, and also that which has not been subjected to the ceremonially polluting touch of outsiders.
This urgency is increased by the fact that different castes proscribe different articles of diet. The Sivar, so-called, are strict vegetarians, and will have absolutely no communion in food with meat-eaters, even though the latter may belong to a higher caste than themselves. Meat of any kind is an abomination to them. Other respectable castes will touch only chicken meat, others mutton, a very few pork, while no caste will permit its members to eat beef. No sin is regarded by the orthodox with more horror than that of killing and eating the flesh of the cow—the most sacred and most commonly worshipped animal of India.
These convivial rules of caste are the greatest obstacles to social union and fellowship among the people of India. Westerners hardly realize the extent to which their communion is based upon the convivial habit. Many times a friendship which lasts a lifetime is formed by strangers sitting together at the common dinner table. And, in the same way, are the old friendships of life generally renewed and cemented in the West. And it is a significant fact that the Christian faith antagonizes Hinduism at this very point by enacting that its great Sacrament of love and communion of life in Christ be embodied in a perpetual and universal "drinking of the same cup and eating of the same bread." In nothing is Hinduism becoming more manifestly a burden to the educated community than in this restriction about inter-dining; and in nothing are they more ready, as we shall see later, to violate caste customs than in this matter.
Then comes, as a natural consequence of the above, limitations to the contact of persons of differing castes. If a Brahman cannot eat with a Sudra, because it supposedly brings a taint to his pure blood, no more can he, with impunity, come into personal contact with him. The touch of such is pollution to his august and pure person; and the very air the low castes breathe brings to his soul and body taint and poison. This idea of ceremonial pollution by contact causes great inconvenience and trouble, and for that reason has been considerably mitigated or modified in recent times. The Rajah of Cochin, who lives temporarily near the writer, and who is evidently a stickler for caste observances, receives calls from European friends only before nine o'clock in the morning, for the obvious reason that that is the hour of his daily ablution. The Maharajah of Travancore bathes at 7 a.m. daily; hence, intending European guests find reception only before that early hour. In the State of Travancore, in which Brahmanical influence is great, even the high caste Nair cannot touch, though he may approach, a Namburi Brahman. A member of the artisan castes will pollute his holiness twenty-four feet off; cultivators at forty-eight feet; the beef-eating Pariah at sixty-four feet. Like the Palestinian leper of old, the low-caste man of that part of India was, until recently, expected to leave the road when he saw a Brahman come, and remove his polluting person to the required number of feet from his sacred presence. Low-caste witnesses were not allowed to approach a court of justice, but standing without, at the requisite distance, to yell their testimony to the Brahman judge who sat in uncontaminated purity within. The falling of the shadow of a low-caste person upon any Brahman in India necessitates an ablution on the part of the latter. It is this frequency of contaminating and polluting contingencies in the life of the Brahman which requires of him so many ablutions daily, and which renders him perhaps the cleanest in person among the sons of men. So many are the dangers of contamination which daily beset him in the ordinary pursuits of life that relief in the form of dispensations is granted him, so as to reduce the ceremonies and diminish the extreme burden of religious observance. This law of contact and pollution must weigh heavily upon any genuine Hindu of high caste. The relation of the Maharajah of Travancore to his Prime Minister, who is a Brahman, is an interesting illustration. The Rajah is not a born Brahman; he is by many of his people regarded as a manufactured Brahman. But His Highness himself does not regard himself as equal, in sacred manhood, to his Brahman Prime Minister; hence he will never be seated in his presence. Nor will the Brahman Dewan deign to sit in the presence of his royal master, the Maharajah. Hence all the business of State (sometimes requiring conferences of three hours a day) is transacted by them while standing in each other's presence.
Occupational limitations are observed, as we have already seen, by many modern castes. Trade castes not only prescribe the one ancestral occupation to their members; they also, with equal distinctness and severity, prohibit to all within their ranks any other work or trade. So in all those legion castes not only has a man his social sphere and status assigned to him, he is also tied to the trade of his ancestors; yea, more, he is expected to confine himself to ancestral tools and methods of work in that narrow rut of life. One day the writer was accosted by a weaver who was in a famishing condition. He made a pathetic plea for charity. Manchester