10. Occupation.
The curing and tanning of hides is the primary occupation of the Chamār, but in 1911 only 80,000 persons, or about a seventh of the actual workers of the caste, were engaged in it, and by Satnāmis the trade has been entirely eschewed. The majority of the Chhattīsgarhi Chamārs are cultivators with tenant right, and a number of them have obtained villages. In the northern Districts, however, the caste are as a rule miserably poor, and none of them own villages. A very few are tenants, and the vast majority despised and bullied helots. The condition of the leather-working Chamārs is described by Mr. Trench as lamentable.[20] Chief among the causes of their ruin has been the recently established trade in raw hides. Formerly the bodies of all cattle dying within the precincts of the village necessarily became the property of the Chamārs, as the Hindu owners could not touch them without loss of caste. But since the rise of the cattle-slaughtering industry the cultivator has put his religious scruples in his pocket, and sells his old and worn-out animals to the butchers for a respectable sum. “For a mere walking skeleton of a cow or bullock from two to four rupees may be had for the asking, and so long as he does not actually see or stipulate for the slaughter of the sacred animal, the cultivator’s scruples remain dormant. No one laments this lapse from orthodoxy more sincerely than the outcaste Chamār. His situation may be compared with that of the Cornish pilchard-fishers, for whom the growing laxity on the part of continental Roman Catholic countries in the observance of Lent is already more than an omen of coming disaster.”[21]
Chamārs tanning and working in leather.