The absurdities into which the caste system runs are well {230} illustrated by some facts which came to my notice on a visit to a school for the Dom caste conducted by some English people in Benares. The Doms burn the bodies of the dead at the Ganges ghats, and do other "dirty work." Incidentally they form the "thief caste" in Benares, and whenever a robbery occurs, the instant presumption is that some Dom is guilty. For this reason a great number of Doms (they belong to the Gypsy class and have no houses anywhere) make it a practice to sleep on the ground just outside the police station nearly all the year round, reporting to the authorities so as to be able to prove an alibi in case of a robbery. So low are the Doms that to touch anything belonging to one works defilement; consequently they leave their most valuable possessions unguarded about their tents or shacks, knowing full well that not even a thief of a higher caste will touch them.
"We had a servant," a Benares lady said to me, "who lost his place rather than take up one end of a forty-foot carpet while a Dom had hold of the other end. The new bearer, his successor, did risk helping move a box with a Dom handling the other side of it, but he was outcasted for the action, and it cost him 25 rupees to be reinstated. And until reinstated, of course, he could not visit kinsmen or friends nor could friends or kinsmen have visited him even to help at a funeral; his priest, his barber, and his washerman would have shunned him. Again, our bearer, who is himself an outcast in the eyes of the Brahmins, will not take a letter from the hands of our Dom chiprassi or messenger boy. Instead, the messenger boy drops the letter on the floor, and the bearer picks it up and thus escapes the pollution that would come from actual contact with the chiprassi." Moreover, there are social gradations even among the Doms. One Dom proudly confided to this lady that he was a sort of superior being because the business of his family was to collect the bones of dead animals, a more respectable work than that in which some other Doms engaged!
Similarly, Mrs. Lee of the Memorial Mission in Calcutta {231} tells how one day when a dead cat had to be moved from her yard her sweeper proudly pulled himself up and assured her that, though the lowest among all servants, he was still too high to touch the body of a dead animal!
My mention of the Doms as the thief caste of Benares makes this a suitable place to say that I was surprised to find evidences of a well-recognized hereditary robber class in not a few places in India. The Thugs, or professional murderers, have at last been exterminated, but the English Government has not yet been able to end the activities of those who regard the plunder of the public as their immemorial right. In Delhi a friend of mine told me that the watchmen are known to be of the robber class. "You hire one of them to watch your house at night, and nothing happens to you. I noticed once or twice that mine was not at his post as he should have been, but had left his shoes and stick. He assured me that this was protection enough, as the robbers would see that I had paid the proper blackmail by hiring one of their number as chowkidar."
In Madura, in southern India, I found the robber element carrying things with a much higher hand. "There's where they live," Dr. J. P. Jones, the well-known writer on Indian affairs, said to me as we were coming home one nightfall, "and the people of Madura pay them a tribute amounting to thousands of rupees a year. They have a god of their own whom they always consult before making a raid. If he signifies his approval of a robbery, it is made; otherwise, not--though it is said that the men have a way of tampering with the verdict so as to make the god favor the enterprise in the great majority of cases."
India's most famous tree, the banyan, grows by dropping down roots from a score or a hundred limbs; these roots fasten themselves in the earth and later become parent trees for other multiplying limbs and roots, until the whole earth is covered. In much the same fashion the Indian caste system has {232} developed. Instead of the four original castes there are now more than five hundred times that number, and the system now decrees irrevocably before birth not only what social station the newborn infant shall occupy from the cradle to the grave (or from the time the conch shell announces the birth of a man-child till the funeral pyre consumes his body, to use Indian terminology), but also decrees almost as irrevocably what business he may or may not follow. A little American girl of my acquaintance once announced that she hadn't decided whether she would be a trained nurse, a chorus-girl, or a missionary; but Hinduism leaves no one in any such embarrassing quandary. Whether a man is to be a priest or a thief is largely decided for him before he knows his own name.
"But isn't the system weakening now?" the reader asks, as I have also asked in almost every quarter of India. The general testimony seems to be that it is weakening, and yet in no very rapid manner. Eventually, no doubt, it will die, but it will die hard. A few weeks ago, a Parliament of Religions was held in connection with the Allabahad Exposition, with his Highness the Maharaja of Darbhanga as the presiding officer. In the course of his "Presidential Address" the Maharaja delivered a lengthy eulogy of the caste system, resorting in part to so specious an argument as the following:
"If education means the drawing forth of the potentialities of a boy and fitting him for taking his ordained place as a member of society, then the caste system has hitherto done this work in a way which no other plan yet contrived has ever done. The mere teaching of a youth a smattering of the three R's and nothing else in a primary school is little else than a mere mockery. Under the caste system the boys are initiated and educated almost from infancy into the family industry, trade, profession, or handicraft, and become adepts in their various lines of life almost before they know it. This unique system of education is one of the blessings of our caste arrangement. We know that a horse commands a high price in the market if it has a long pedigree behind it. It is not unreasonable to presume that a carpenter whose forefathers have followed the same trade for centuries will be a better carpenter than one who is new to the trade--all other advantages being equal."
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In the phrase, "his ordained place as a member of society," we have the keynote of the philosophy upon which the whole caste system rests. It suits the Maharaja of Darbhanga to have the people believe that his sons were "ordained" of Heaven to be rulers, even if "not fit to stop a gully with," and the Sudra's sons "ordained" to be servants, no matter what their qualities of mind and soul. But the caste system is rotting down in other places and some time or other this "ordained" theory will also give way and the whole vast fabric will totter to the ruin it has long and richly merited.