6. Social position.
The Dhobi is considered to be impure, and he is not allowed to come into the houses of the better castes nor to touch their water-vessels. In Saugor he may come as far as the veranda but not into the house. His status would in any case be low as a village menial, but he is specially degraded, Mr. Crooke states, by his task of washing the clothes of women after child-birth and his consequent association with puerperal blood, which is particularly abhorred. Formerly a Brāhman did not let the Dhobi wash his clothes, or, if he did, they were again steeped in water in the house as a means of purification. Now he contents himself with sprinkling the clean clothes with water in which a piece of gold has been dipped. The Dhobi is not so impure as the Chamār and Basor, and if a member of the higher castes touches him inadvertently it is considered sufficient to wash the face and hands only and not the clothes.
Colonel Tod writes[4] that in Rājputāna the washermen’s wells dug at the sides of streams are deemed the most impure of all receptacles. And one of the most binding oaths is that a man as he swears should drop a pebble into one of these wells, saying, “If I break this oath may all the good deeds of my forefathers fall into the washerman’s well like this pebble.” Nevertheless the Dhobi refuses to wash the clothes of some of the lowest castes as the Māng, Mahār and Chamār. Like the Teli the Dhobi is unlucky, and it is a bad omen to see him when starting on a journey or going out in the morning. But among some of the higher castes on the occasion of a marriage the elder members of the bridegroom’s family go with the bride to the Dhobi’s house. His wife presents the bride with betel-leaf and in return is given clothes with a rupee. This ceremony is called sohāg or good fortune, and the present from the Dhobin is supposed to be lucky. In Berār the Dhobi is also a Balūtedār or village servant. Mr. Kitts writes of him:[5] “At a wedding he is called upon to spread the clothes on which the bridegroom and his party alight on coming to the bride’s house; he also provides the cloth on which the bride and bridegroom are to sit and fastens the kankan (bracelet) on the girl’s hand. In the Yeotmāl District the barber and the washerman sometimes take the place of the maternal uncle in the jhenda dance; and when the bridegroom, assisted by five married women, has thrown the necklace of black beads round the bride’s neck and has tied it with five knots, the barber and the washerman advance, and lifting the young couple on their thighs dance to the music of the wājantri, while the bystanders besprinkle them with red powder.”
In Chhattīsgarh the Dhobis appear to have partly abandoned their hereditary profession and taken to agriculture and other callings. Sir Benjamin Robertson writes of them:[6] “The caste largely preponderates in Chhattīsgarh, a part of the country where, at least to the superficial observer, it would hardly seem as if its services were much availed of; the number of Dhobis in Raipur and Bilāspur is nearly 40,000. In both Districts the washerman is one of the recognised village servants, but as a rule he gets no fixed payment, and the great body of cultivators dispense with his services altogether. According to the Raipur Settlement Report (Mr. Hewett), he is employed by the ryots only to wash the clothes of the dead, and he is never found among a population of Satnāmis. It may therefore be assumed that in Chhattīsgarh the Bareth caste has largely taken to cultivation.” In Bengal Sir H. Risley states[7] that “the Dhobi often gives up his caste trade and follows the profession of a writer, messenger or collector of rent (tahsīldār), and it is an old native tradition that a Bengali Dhobi was the first interpreter the English factory at Calcutta had, while it is further stated that our early commercial transactions were carried on solely through the agency of low-caste natives. The Dhobi, however, will never engage himself as an indoor servant in the house of a European.”