CAMBAY TYPE
For that law can be tolerable only when it is fully comprehended. But as they advance in civilization and the conversion to Hinduism is solidified, as it were, by developing education, so the ideal, more and more clearly grasped, begins to be followed in practice. It is at this stage that child-marriage and the unrelieved doom of widowhood are introduced. New India therefore presents the paradox that while in the upper class a few, gained to the cause of rationalism, allow widows to remarry, discarding almost with violence the old sanctions and the old beliefs, side by side in the great mass of the people the prejudice daily grows and millions now forbid remarriage who thirty years ago would never have dreamt of the restriction.
But as a whole the properly Hinduized lower castes have no great interest to the observer. The conduct of the women is as close as possible an imitation of the better class, deflected as in all countries by poverty and labour and by the inevitable roughness and coarser understanding of their class. To trace in detail the full recent growth and development of such a caste might have its interest, but would transgress the purpose and limits of this book. Of especial interest, should anyone attempt it, would be the development, of the dairyman and milkmaid class in India. Divided into many septs, and in some instances differing now in race, they are descended from the Scythian tribes of Gujjar and Ahir. It would be interesting to trace them from the uplands of Kashmir, where they still roam, through the Gangetic plain to Káthiawád, where among many pretty women their women—Cháran and Rabári—are perhaps the most beautiful, and where their men are genealogists and bards, and stand surety for the treaty bonds of kings. Even in appearance, and greatly still in custom, they have much of the high mountain air of the great plateaux on the roof of Asia, where once they wandered with their sheep over dry, wind-swept uplands.
THE MILKMAID
More homogenous and far more thoroughly imbued in the Hindu tint are the striking fisher or Són Koli caste of the western coasts. The collective name of Koli covers a multitude of tribes—not yet fully embraced in the Hindu caste system—whose unity of name and manifold distinction in fact forms one of the most difficult of the unexplained problems of Indian ethnology. A century ago most of their tribes were freebooters, cattle-lifters, caterans. Many Koli families won themselves little principalities, and some have got themselves recognized among the Rajput clans. Others are peaceful cultivators, and there are many who live as labourers by the sweat of their brow. But to this day there are some who prefer crime, and will even board a running train to rob the goods waggons. All of them have, perhaps, some strain of descent from an earlier race—Kolarian, or call it what you will—settled in India before the Aryan invasions. But it is clear that, though they retained a tribal organization, they must in great but varying proportion have mingled with and assumed the characters of other races. In places they are hard to distinguish from the aboriginal Bhil; in other regions—in Káthiawád, for instance, and the salt plains where the receding sea has made way between Gujarát and Sind—they seem rather to be the residue of a Rajput soldiery, common soldiers perhaps, not ennobled by a diplomatic victory, or married to women of some earlier tribe. At any rate among some of these tribes there subsist traces of customs foreign to the rest of India, such as the rule of marrying an elder brother’s widow or of the younger brother, even before her widowhood, sharing in her favours.
But of community with those wilder clans there is now little trace in the customs of the fisher tribes who live upon the shore that stretches from north of Bombay City down towards the Malabar coast. In the past a certain fondness for piracy was perhaps a solitary sign of a probable connection. From their appearance, however, it is clear that they are the descendants of a people as widely distinguished on the one hand from the darker farming and labouring castes who form the major part of the population, as on the other they are from the grey-eyed and pallid Brahmans of the coast who are its spiritual aristocracy. Distinguished physically from the other inhabitants by their light-brown complexion, the round curves of their faces, and their smiling expressions, they are equally distinguished by their occupation, their separate dialect, and their aristocratic constitution. It is also clear that from the date of their settlement on the coast-line, they have kept themselves unusually unaffected either by the amours or by the moral and mental ideals of the surrounding population. History is not plain in the matter of their arrival on the coast, but a probable inference from tradition is that most of the present day Kolis are descended from immigrants who came down from the hills some four hundred years ago. It was only about two centuries ago, under the rule of the Peshwas, that they entered the fold of Hinduism, and they themselves say that they were first taught to know the Gods at that time by one Kálu Bhagat, an ascetic who had himself been of their tribe.
They are peaceful enough now, but they are still bold sailors, and it is their fishing-boats which bring the daily catch to the Bombay market. The men are handsome and well-built, with curious scarlet caps, like an ascetic’s, which are the distinctive uniform of their class. But, as would seem in all countries to be the case with fisher-folk, where the man toils on the sea and on shore rests and smokes in idleness, in the daily round of life it is the woman who counts most. At home she is mistress, and she takes the earnings of her man and gives him what he needs for his drink and smoke. She carries the fish to market and drives her bargain with keen shrewdness. She does not lose as a saleswoman by the attraction of her smiling lips, showing her sound white teeth, and of her trim, tight figure. The dress is striking. The skimpy mantle or sari is slung tight between the legs and over the upper thigh, so that every movement of limb and curve of figure shows in bold lines, as the fisherwoman carries her basket on her head to the crowded market. The freedom and strength that they draw from the ocean is preserved by a customary law which allows women a reasonable liberty. In many ways the Koli fishwife is as fine and independent as her sister of Newhaven in Scotland. Like her, she has her share of her husband’s drink when there are guests in the house or the sorrow of the swirling, driving rain is forgotten in a cheering glass. On their right hand these women wear a silvern bracelet of peculiar and heavy shape such as is worn by no other caste. No other bangle or bracelet, ornament or jewel is worn on that hand; and the absence of such adornments is for them a sign of the covenant under which God protects his fishers from the perils of the deep.