Page:The Religion of the Veda.djvu/23
Bengal, there is no intercourse between potters who turn their wheels a-sitting and make small pots, and them that stand up for the manufacture of large pots. A certain class of dairymen who make butter from unboiled milk have been excluded from the caste, and cannot marry the daughters of milkmen who churn upon more orthodox principles. Even as late a census as that of 1901 reports, and in a way gives its sanction to the Cimmerian notion that the touch of the lower caste man defiles the higher:
While a Nayar can pollute a man of a higher cast only by touching him, people of the Kammalan group, including masons, blacksmiths, carpenters, and workers in leather, pollute at a distance of twenty-four feet, toddy drawers at thirty-six feet, Palayan or Cheruman cultivators at forty-eight feet; while in the case of the Paraiyan (Pariahs) who eat beef, the range of pollution is stated to be no less than sixty-four feet.[1]
Thus Hindu society is split into infinitely small divisions, each holding itself aloof from the other, each engaged in making its exclusiveness as complete as possible. Members of a lower caste cannot rise into a higher caste; the individual is restricted to such progress only as is possible within the confines of his caste. To the Pariah the door of hope
- ↑ Quoted from New Ideas in India, by the Rev. Dr. John Morrison (Edinburgh, 1906), p. 33.