THE UNTOUCHABLES : UNTOUCHABILITY AMONG HINDUS 267
never been a case of permanent impunity based on the rule ‘once impure always impure’. Persons were treated as impure by Non-Hindu Communities and they were even cut off from social intercourse. But there has never been a case of persons having been put into permanent segregation camps. A whole body of people have been treated as impure by Non-Hindu communities. But they were strangers outside the fold of the kindred. There has never been a case of a people treating a section of their own people as permanently and hereditarily impure.
Untouchability among Hindus is thus a unique phenomenon, unknown to humanity in other parts of the world. Nothing like it is to be found in any other society- primitive, ancient or modern. The many problems that arise out of a study of Untouchability and which call for investigation may be reduced to two :
(1) Why do the Untouchables live outside the village?
(2) What made their impurity permanent, and ineradicable?
The following pages are devoted to finding answers to these two questions.
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