कॅथरीन मेयो ``: `: ` ` ` ग्रंथ ५०५
Regarded as if sub-human, the tasks held basest are reserved for them; dishonour is associated with their name. Some are permitted to serve only as scavengers and removers of night soil; some, through the ignorance to which they are condemned, are loathsome in their habits; and to all of them the privilege of any sort of teaching is sternly denied. They may neither possess nor read the Hindu scriptures. No Brahman priest will minister to them; and, except in rarest instances, they may not enter a Hindu temple to whorship or pray. Their children may notcome to the public schools. They may notdraw water fromthe public wells; and if their habitation be in a region where water is scarce and sources far apart, this means, for them, not greater consideration from others, but greater suffering and greater toil.
They may not enter a court of justice; they may not enter a dispensary to get help for their sick; they may stop at no inn. In some provinces they may not even use the public road, and as labourers or agriculturists they are continually losers, in that they may not enter the shops or even pass through the streets where shops are, but must trust to a haphazard chain of hungry go-betweens to buy or sell their meagre wares. Some, inthe abyss of their degradation, are permitted no work at all. These may sell nothing, not even their own labour. They may only beg. And even for that purpose they dare not use the road, but must stand far off, unseen, and cry out for alms from those who pass. If alms be given, it must be tossed on the ground, well away from the road, and when the giver is out of sight and the roads empty, then, and nottill then, the watcher may creep up, snatch, and run.
Some, if not all, pollute, beyond caste men's use, any food upon which their shadow falls. Food, after such defilement, can only be destroyed.
Others, again exude ‘distant pollution’ as an effluvium from their unhappy bodies. If one of these pressumes to approach and linger by a high-road, he must measure the distance to the high-road. If it be within two hundred yards, he must carefully place on the road a green leaf weighted down with a handful of earth, thereby indicating that he, the unclean, is within pollution distance ofthat point. The passing Brahman, seeing the signal, halts and shouts. The poor man forthwith takes to his heels, and only when he has fled far enough calls back, ‘| am now two hundred yards away. Be pleased to pass. ’
Still others—the Puliahs of the Malbar Coast—have been forbidden to build themselves huts, and permitted to construct for houses nothing better than a sort of leaf awning on poles, or nests in the crotches of big trees. These may approach no other type of humanity. Dubois re- corded that, in his day, a Nair (high-caste Hindu) meeting a Puliah in the road, was entitle to stab the offender on the spot.* To-day the Nair would hesitate. But still, to-day, the Puliah may approach no caste man nearer than sixty or ninety [feet. ] [' ]
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*+ Hindu Manners, Customs and ceremonies, pp. 60-. See also Three Voyages of Vasco de Gama, Gaspar Correa, Hakluyt Society, London, 1869, p. 155.
1 : Katherine Mayo, Mother India, P.p. 141—143.