UNTOUCHABILITY AND LAWLESSNESS 39
use they were first flatly told it was not for them, and when they complained to the Punch the latter generously allowed them to lay a pipe 500 feet long at the end of which they could have a tap all for themselves. Now an unexpected owner of the land at the tap had cropped up, so the pipe line was taken somewhere near to the local tank, but this meant pollution of the tank and therefore of the dirty linen washed there. So the tap was accommodated elsewhere. But did this mean the end of the trouble? No, the enraged caste people have cut the pipe line several times and the Antyajas are without water to drink. How very ‘adequate’ to use Mr. Gandhi’s term, must the Untouchables feel the treatment given to them by their coreligionists.”
Mr. Sanjana in a letter to the ‘ Times of India ’ of the 7th November
1928 reports what Mr. Thakkar saw in the year 1927 regarding the awful plight of the Untouchables in the matter of water.
“In Balsad Taluk, Mr. Thakkar saw a Bhangi woman waiting near a well for some merciful ‘people’ to give her some water. She had waited from morning till noon, and none had given her any. But the most exquisite touch of spirituality is revealed in the manner of giving water to the Bhangis; it cannot be poured direct into their pots—any ‘people’ doing so would get polluted. Says, Mr. Thakkar, ‘once our teacher Chunibhai had shown the temerity of pouring water direct from his bucket into a Bhangi’s pot and he had received a stern warning in consequence ‘Master this sort of thing won’t be (tolerated) here’. A small cistern is built below the slope of the well. Anyone who is moved by pity may pour some water in the cistern. A bamboo pipe just out of the cistern, and the Bhangi women must put her pot under the pipe, and it may get filled in an hour or so. For, adds Mr. Thakkar, it is only the unwanted water remaining over in the bucket of the woman drawing it that is as a rule thrown into the cistern, and that too if she takes pity on the waiting Bhangi woman.”
III
Under the established order, the Untouchables have no right to education and certainly have no right to be admitted to the village school. Those Untouchables who have dared to make a breach in these rules of the Established Order have been severely punished by the Hindus. The following are only a few of the numerous cases that have happened: