The principal deity of the Dhobis is Ghatoia, the god of the ghāt or landing-place on the river to which they go to wash their clothes. Libations of liquor are made to him in the month of Asārh (June), when the rains break and the rivers begin to be flooded. Before entering the water to wash the clothes they bow to the stone on which these are beaten out, asking that their work may be quickly finished; and they also pray to the river deity to protect them from snakes and crocodiles. They worship the stone on the Dasahra festival, making an offering to it of flowers, turmeric and cooked food. The Dhobi’s washing-stone is believed to be haunted by the ghosts of departed Dhobis when revisiting the glimpses of the moon, and is held to have magical powers. If a man requires a love-charm he should steal a supāri or areca-nut from the bazār at night or on the occasion of an eclipse. The same night he goes to the Dhobi’s stone and sets the nut upon it. He breaks an egg and a cocoanut over the stone and burns incense before it. Then he takes the nut away and gives it to the woman of his fancy, wrapped up in betel-leaf, and she will love him. Their chief festivals are the Holi and Diwāli, at which they drink a great deal. The dead are buried or burnt as may be convenient, and mourning is observed for three days only, the family being purified on the Sunday or Wednesday following the death. They have a caste committee whose president is known as Mehtar, while other officials are the Chaudhri or vice-president, and the Badkur, who appoints dates for the penal feasts and issues the summons to the caste-fellows. These posts are hereditary and their holders receive presents of a rupee and a cloth when members of the caste have to give expiatory feasts.
5. Occupation: washing clothes.
Before washing his clothes the Dhobi steams them,[2] hanging them in a bundle for a time over a cauldron of boiling water. After this he takes them to a stream or pond and washes them roughly with fuller’s earth. The washerman steps nearly knee-deep into the water, and taking a quantity of clothes by one end in his two hands he raises them aloft in the air and brings them down heavily upon a huge stone slab, grooved, at his feet. This threshing operation he repeats until his clothes are perfectly clean. In Saugor the clothes are rubbed with wood-ashes at night and beaten out in water with a stick in the morning. Silk clothes are washed with the nut of the rītha tree (Sapindus emarginatus) which gives a lather like soap. Sir H. Risley writes of the Dacca washermen:[3] “For washing muslins and other coloured garments well or spring water is alone used; but if the articles are the property of a poor man or are commonplace, the water of the nearest tank or river is accounted sufficiently good. Indigo is in as general use as in England for removing the yellowish tinge and whitening the material. The water of the wells and springs bordering on the red laterite formation on the north of the city has been for centuries celebrated, and the old bleaching fields of the European factories were all situated in this neighbourhood. Various plants are used by the Dhobis to clarify water such as the nirmali (Strychnos potatorum), the piu (Basella), the nāgphani (Cactus indicus) and several plants of the mallow family. Alum, though not much valued, is sometimes used.” In most Districts of the Central Provinces the Dhobi is employed as a village servant and is paid by annual contributions of grain from the cultivators. For ordinary washing he gets half as much as the blacksmith or carpenter, or 13 to 20 lbs. of grain annually from each householder, with about another 10 lbs. at seedtime or harvest. When he brings the clothes home he also receives a meal or a chapāti, and well-to-do persons give him their old clothes as a present. In return for this he washes all the clothes of the family two or three times a month, except the loin-cloths and women’s bodices which they themselves wash daily. The Dhobi is also employed on the occasion of a birth or a death. These events cause impurity and hence all the clothes of all the members of the family must be washed when the impurity ceases. In Saugor when a man dies the Dhobi receives eight annas and for a woman four annas, and similar rates in the case of the birth of a male or female child. When the first son is born in a family the Dhobi and barber place a brass vessel on the top of a pole and tie a flag to it as a cloth and take it round to all the friends and relations of the family, announcing the event. They receive presents of grain and money which they expend on a drinking-bout.
6. Social position.
The Dhobi is considered to be impure, and he is not allowed to come into the houses of the better castes nor to touch their water-vessels. In Saugor he may come as far as the veranda but not into the house. His status would in any case be low as a village menial, but he is specially degraded, Mr. Crooke states, by his task of washing the clothes of women after child-birth and his consequent association with puerperal blood, which is particularly abhorred. Formerly a Brāhman did not let the Dhobi wash his clothes, or, if he did, they were again steeped in water in the house as a means of purification. Now he contents himself with sprinkling the clean clothes with water in which a piece of gold has been dipped. The Dhobi is not so impure as the Chamār and Basor, and if a member of the higher castes touches him inadvertently it is considered sufficient to wash the face and hands only and not the clothes.
Colonel Tod writes[4] that in Rājputāna the washermen’s wells dug at the sides of streams are deemed the most impure of all receptacles. And one of the most binding oaths is that a man as he swears should drop a pebble into one of these wells, saying, “If I break this oath may all the good deeds of my forefathers fall into the washerman’s well like this pebble.” Nevertheless the Dhobi refuses to wash the clothes of some of the lowest castes as the Māng, Mahār and Chamār. Like the Teli the Dhobi is unlucky, and it is a bad omen to see him when starting on a journey or going out in the morning. But among some of the higher castes on the occasion of a marriage the elder members of the bridegroom’s family go with the bride to the Dhobi’s house. His wife presents the bride with betel-leaf and in return is given clothes with a rupee. This ceremony is called sohāg or good fortune, and the present from the Dhobin is supposed to be lucky. In Berār the Dhobi is also a Balūtedār or village servant. Mr. Kitts writes of him:[5] “At a wedding he is called upon to spread the clothes on which the bridegroom and his party alight on coming to the bride’s house; he also provides the cloth on which the bride and bridegroom are to sit and fastens the kankan (bracelet) on the girl’s hand. In the Yeotmāl District the barber and the washerman sometimes take the place of the maternal uncle in the jhenda dance; and when the bridegroom, assisted by five married women, has thrown the necklace of black beads round the bride’s neck and has tied it with five knots, the barber and the washerman advance, and lifting the young couple on their thighs dance to the music of the wājantri, while the bystanders besprinkle them with red powder.”
In Chhattīsgarh the Dhobis appear to have partly abandoned their hereditary profession and taken to agriculture and other callings. Sir Benjamin Robertson writes of them:[6] “The caste largely preponderates in Chhattīsgarh, a part of the country where, at least to the superficial observer, it would hardly seem as if its services were much availed of; the number of Dhobis in Raipur and Bilāspur is nearly 40,000. In both Districts the washerman is one of the recognised village servants, but as a rule he gets no fixed payment, and the great body of cultivators dispense with his services altogether. According to the Raipur Settlement Report (Mr. Hewett), he is employed by the ryots only to wash the clothes of the dead, and he is never found among a population of Satnāmis. It may therefore be assumed that in Chhattīsgarh the Bareth caste has largely taken to cultivation.” In Bengal Sir H. Risley states[7] that “the Dhobi often gives up his caste trade and follows the profession of a writer, messenger or collector of rent (tahsīldār), and it is an old native tradition that a Bengali Dhobi was the first interpreter the English factory at Calcutta had, while it is further stated that our early commercial transactions were carried on solely through the agency of low-caste natives. The Dhobi, however, will never engage himself as an indoor servant in the house of a European.”
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.”