A man may not eat with another not of his own caste.
His meals must be cooked by persons either of his own caste or by Brahmans.
No man of an inferior caste is to touch his food or the dishes in which they are served, or even to enter his cook-room.
No water or other liquid contaminated by the touch of a person of inferior caste can be made use of—rivers, tanks, and other large sheets of water being held incapable of defilement.
Articles of dry food, such as rice, wheat, etc., do not become impure by passing through the hands of a person of inferior caste so long as they remain dry, but cannot be taken if they become wet or greased.
Certain prohibited articles, such as cow’s flesh, pork, fowls, etc., are not to be eaten.
The ocean and other boundaries of India must not be crossed.
These rules would not be so oppressive if there were only the four original great castes into which society was first divided, but now each class is divided into thousands of subdivisions, whose members may not intermarry, nor eat together, nor even touch the food prepared by those of another community. Mr. Sidney Low has very well expressed the difficulties caused by this very intricate social ruling in his “Vision of India”—
“To get a loose analogy, we might suppose that everybody who could claim descent from one of the old Norman families in England formed one caste; that members of the ‘learned professions,’ who had never soiled themselves with commerce, were combined in a second; and that others consisted exclusively of bankers or moneylenders, or of pork butchers, costermongers, bricklayers, and so on ad infinitum.
“Add that a man born in the costermonger class would remain, or ought to remain, a member of that connection to the end of his days, and that he would bring up his sons to the same business; that a greengrocer ought not to eat food in company with a poulterer, that a baker might not give his daughter in marriage to a cheesemonger, and that neither could have any matrimonial relations with a bootmaker; and, further, that none of these persons could place himself in personal contact with a clergyman or a solicitor—imagine all this, and you begin to acquire some faint notion of the involved tangle in which the entire Hindu community has managed to get itself enwound.”