7. Proverbs about the Dhobi.
Like the other castes who supply the primary needs of the people, the Dhobi is not regarded with much favour by his customers, and they revenge themselves in various sarcasms at his expense for the injury caused to their clothes by his drastic measures. The following are mentioned by Sir G. Grierson:[8] ‘Dhobi par Dhobi base, tab kapre par sābun pare’, or ‘When many Dhobis compete, then some soap gets to the clothes,’ and ‘It is only the clothes of the Dhobi’s father that never get torn.’ The Dhobi’s donkey is a familiar sight as one meets him on the road still toiling as in the time of Issachar between two bundles of clothes each larger than himself, and he has also become proverbial, ‘Dhobi ka gadha neh ghar ka neh ghāt ka,’ ‘The Dhobi’s donkey is always on the move’; and ‘The ass has only one master (a washerman), and the washerman has only one steed (an ass).’ The resentment felt for the Dhobi by his customers is not confined to his Indian clients, as may be seen from Eha’s excellent description of the Dhobi in Behind the Bungalow; and it may perhaps be permissible to introduce here the following short excerpt, though it necessarily loses in force by being detached from the context: “Day after day he has stood before that great black stone and wreaked his rage upon shirt and trouser and coat, and coat and trouser and shirt. Then he has wrung them as if he were wringing the necks of poultry, and fixed them on his drying line with thorns and spikes, and finally he has taken the battered garments to his torture chamber and ploughed them with his iron, longwise and crosswise and slantwise, and dropped glowing cinders on their tenderest places. Son has followed father through countless generations in cultivating this passion for destruction, until it has become the monstrous growth which we see and shudder at in the Dhobi.”