THE OUTCASTS OF INDIA

Evening Star, Issue 22816, 26 November 1937, Page 2

THE OUTCASTS OF INDIA

SIXTY MILLION OPPRESSED PMILEM OF THE DHTOIKIUIIES During some recent travels in British India some friends and I were one day touring in the State of Orissa near Kalahandi, says Edmond Demaitre, in ‘ Lectures Pour Tous,’ Paris. We had taken the main highway, and had, walked for several hours under a torrid sun which seemed to transform the country into an inferno. The road was deserted; travellers and peasants alike had sought refuge under the tamarindtrees and banyans whose leaves were hidden in a thick layer of dust and sand. ... Suddenly a shrill cry broke the deathly spell of heat and silence. A fantastic creature, running as if it were chased by a swarm of djinns, and clutching in its arms a dozen: or so palm leaves, had left the road for the fields, all the while shouting meaningless things. I had often heard that the village Hindu women had an insane fear of, white men j they think that the very sight of their fine dark skins is enough to make the most stoic feringhee lose his head. Thinking that we might just now have witnessed a wild flower of Hindustan saving herself from an imaginary danger, I said to my. friends: “She’s certainly frightened » ; ~ she must be very pretty, eh? . •. “ She?” my more experienced English friend replied. ,“ That was aa - - * untouchable ’ getting out of our way, and giving warning. . . . Remember, a Brahmin cannot associate with us, and the mere presence of an untouchable is enough to drive him a hundred yards away.” “ You don’t mean to tell me. that these things exist in 1937?” I remonstrated. “ They do still exist, and will last for a long time to come,” he answered. Sixty million human beings living as social outcasts form what is known' in India as tho “ oppressed classes.” Sixty million human beings living in sordid hovels of obscure caves 'survive on the waste which they find in the streets and which they fight over like animals; they sleep on straw, live in. filth, and die like beasts, stretched out on manure-heaps, whence they return to fertilise the land. The worst suffering caused by torture and confinement is nothing compared to the abject misery, the physical and moral baseness in which the untouchable is condemned to live. Consigned to filthy quarters, forced to the most degrading drudgery, hounded, mistreated, and oppressed by all the world, the untouchable finds himself in a worse plight than the leper. The leper can hope for a cure. But no miracle can save the untouchable. No one can erase the brand of his dishonour, stamped upon him by his birth. He is chased from the temples, and heaven help him if in passing a Hindu at his meal he allows his shadow to fall on the rice or pancakes. For the Hindu would be obliged to throw his defiled food into the river and _to pay a Brahmin at least a rupee for purification. And h© would thrash. th« poor untouchable with a stick. When he crosses the highway tho ■untouchable ■. must' shout-' 'continually and throw down palm leaves at certain points to mark his approach or passing, for the Brahmins and Kachatrya* are subject to defilement at a which varies, according to regions, between 30 and 40 yards.' He is forbidden to bow before the gross pitiless idols of the temples. . Some vears ago, following the celebrated “"Poona Pact,” Gandhi launched a campaign for the emancipation of tho untouchables. In one day he came close to losing his immense popularity. Meetings followed meetings, in the large cities, violent mobs-spilled bloody and fanatic Brahmins scoured the peninsula to organise resistance to what, they called “ sacrilegious reforms. * Yet all Gandhi proposed was that the untouchables be allowed to enter the temples. Since the orthodox Hindus of Madras unanimously rejected this proposal the untouchables decided to make a “ symbolic gesture.” They invaded the forbidden precincts, and as a sign of protest laid their hands on the sacred elephants. The answer to this act was a massacre of untouchables, then the purification of the tempi© and th.© elephants, and filially, the organisation of processions and expiatory sacrifices. The problems of the untouchables m India is the appalling result of the first racial experiment known to history. The untouchables are the descendants of coloured people who inhabited the Hindu Peninsula before the invamon of white-skinned Aryans. In order to maintain their purity—their colour and rracial characteristics —the Aryans established the present cast system by which they hoped to avoid mixing. But the results have been that the Aryans •* skin has darkened, they have lost the characteristics of the white race; bub they keep intact their inhuman social system. . , „ “Born a pariah, always a pariah, ■ is the dictum, and indeed there is no case oh record where an untouchable has ever succeeded iu breaking tba barriers of his thousand-year-old prison. His child is also a pariah, and his children’s children are untouchables to the end of time. No matter how. courageous, intelligent, or ambitions he may be, the untouchable can have no hope of emancipation as long as he remains in India. ) . It is true that there is one means of escape: conversion to Christianity. But the escape is not real, for the Hindu considers all those outside his own faith as untouchables. As a “ Christian untouchable ” the Indian’s life may be a little more tolerable. This explains in part why most Hindus who accept Christianity belong to the class of untouchables. The situation is slightly different with the casteless girl. She may fall into the hands of pandas—lndian kid< nappers —who ride through 4he poor sections of the untouchables in search of girls of six to eight years. When a child is kidnapped she is brought to the Punjab, where the men are strong and healthy and the women are rare. Affirming that the little girl belong* to the Brahmin or Kaqhatyras caste, they sell her to some man as a “ fiancee.” When the marriage has been celebrated, the panda will receive payment, and everybody will be satisfied, the husband because he has a wife, the wife because she is no longer a pariah, and the parents because they will no longer have to support their 'daughter. In any case, if the girl had hot been sold by the panda, she would suffer the same fate at the hands of her parents but without enjoying her change of caste.