Between the twilights

by Cornelia Sorabji

It is a little difficult to explain because there is, I think, no exact parallel in the institutions of the West. It is a combination of several determining causes of exclusiveness—the social Western conception of the right instinct and the appropriate culture, the interests of labour as represented by trade-guildism, and the Judaic idea of a chosen people as something peculiarly the care of a God who nevertheless made all the world.

And, at the present day, the social and economic distinctions are merged in the religious, so that the feeling, as we find it, is of a barrier placed by God, not man. Is it not exactly otherwise in the nearest parallel afforded by the West? Your neighbour may, in Church, I take it, assume the privileges of an equal; in the Park he may not. The Hindu high-caste man might joke and laugh with his inferior in the Park; but he will not go to Church with him, i.e., he will not eat with him because this is a religious act, and he will not “pray” with him in the sense of admitting him to certain mysteries of the religion, or the performance of certain sacrifices. Again, caste implies breeding, only relatively. Indeed, even the lowest person in the scale of life will talk of his caste. “I am of the caste of the sweeper,” he will say quite proudly; and he has further been known to say: “I am of the caste of—the Outcast”; because he knows of some one who will do what is tabooed even to him. Caste—that is—denotes a man’s place on the ladder of life, but not of necessity his place on any one rung rather than another. In this sense, it is a mere label.

Further, we must remember that with Caste as a rule—nascitur non fit. There have been known people who used a semblance of tribal name to climb into a caste above their own; or again, take the “Eaters-in-relief-kitchens,” a caste in Orissa made, we are told, of those who lost their original caste by accepting relief in famine time; and there are at our doors others, who by persistent self-restraint and imitation of the customs of a higher caste pass by courtesy for such; but these do not deceive the elect into intermarriage. A man may buy himself salvation, a higher place in the world to come by his spiritual re-genesis. There is no bribe of whatever kind which in this world, will put him on to even the very next rung of that ladder of Caste.

Now, is it clear that with all this machinery of exclusiveness there is no condemnation one of another? If I am of the highest caste, in this genesis, sitting on the top step of our socio-religious ladder, and you, say, on the fourth, I must of necessity exclude you from “bread and water.” That rule our religion, which is greater than either of us, has made; but that does not mean that I will not associate myself with you in other ways. True, I would not let my Zenana visit yours—my women are part of my religion—but you and I might play together, buy and sell together, work together, travel together....

And yet, again, this contamination against which I am bound to guard myself is ceremonial not moral. It is not because you would teach me to swear or lie or thieve that I cannot dine at your table, but because drinking water at your hands, and eating what has been cooked at your fire, is within the canonical “Thou shalt not.” The odd thing is that until English education brought other ideas to the country, no one resented his place in life. “Why kick against the inevitable?” he would argue. “I shall come again; who knows but that in my next genesis I might not myself be sitting on that topmost step?” All is in a man’s own hands—he will reap hereafter, as he sows now this minute....

And Hindu women? How has caste affected them? We have seen that it was invented primarily for their benefit, for though a man might marry beneath him, no woman was allowed like liberty. The natural result of this arrangement was that there were too few men to go round in the higher castes; and in a scheme of life and after life which has no room or use for spinsters, the only resource was to marry them off as quickly as possible, whence, in the opinion of some, infant marriage, though the instinct of self-preservation against Mahommedan raids must have done something.

Of course, no woman realizes this, and the reason she will give you for Baby marriages is that a Father’s class of Heaven depends on the age at which his daughter was married. If she is settled between three and five he goes to a first-class heaven, if between five and eight to a second class, eight and eleven to a third class—after that to hells, only to hells! For herself she is content with the most detailed and minute table of procedure, nor questions how it was made. She knows far better than any man the difference between +A and -A. She will tell you also quaint exceptions to the God-rules. “You may stand by So-and-so when she is cooking a dish of green (but not red) pulse, and never never when she is cooking rice. It would all have to be thrown away, it and the vessels, even if the shadow of a shadow fell across it.” In South India I have heard tell of a caste of Brahmins so strict that no lower caste may come within thirty yards of its elect; and when the high-caste woman walks abroad, she has a fore-runner clearing the way before her face.

Again, with some castes not only must you, being alien or of a lower caste, not touch their water or water vessels, but you must not enter the room which holds the drinking-water. If you do, the water is defiled. They have too good manners to tell you this. It may be their last drop of water in a drought, nevertheless, when you have gone away, the water is faithfully rejected. Nor, again, may they drink water even at the hands of the elect if the alien or outer-brother is in the room.

Different civilizations, different notions of cleanliness. The point seems to be to learn each other’s aversions and respect them. The Hindu is horrified at the use of tooth-brushes. “What! use the same brush twice?” She herself uses a twig of the Neem tree, no fatter than her own smallest finger, and of course there is a fresh twig for each using. Again, at the use of tubs, “You go dirty into the water from which you expect to come out clean,” she exclaims. You refer gently to the bathing in the Ganges. “Ah, but that is different,” she will answer, “that is holy water, however apparently impure, however apparently contaminated, it is holy.” Her reasoning explains what hitherto puzzled me—how little particular the Hindu is about the intrinsic cleanliness of water, despite her belief in sacred streams. The Founders of the religion, knowing the value of water in a hot country, called it sacred, no doubt in order to keep it clean. Their thought was, “It is sacred, do not defile it.” The modern Hindu says, “It is sacred—even the thing that most defiles, cannot defile it.”

The same Hindu who will bathe before touching the sacred basil, will be absolutely indifferent as to the water in which she bathes. If it is a sacred river, a sacred tank, it may be thick as pea soup with impurities. That is no matter.... Again, another incongruity. The eating of the flesh of the cow revolts a Hindu—you do not realize how strongly till it is something other than yourself—as a dog, suspected of a meat diet, who sniffs at them; and yet the sacrifice of goats at Kalighat, for instance, cannot be seen unmoved by the most inveterate eater of flesh.