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By the system of castes, the Hindoos have been divided into so many selfish sections, each scowling on all the rest with feelings of hatred and contempt. The spirit which upholds it, is similar to that spirit which says, "Stand by thyself, for I am holier than thou," and, of course, is nothing but pride.
And by the annihilation of sectarianism and its castes, the people will be freed from a very burdensome tax now going to the support of a large and lazy body of men, women, and children, whose only object in existence seems to be to eat and consume, and who, besides, by their idleness and habits, keep up a system of detraction, jealousy, and discord among otherwise well-disposed citizens, that, like so many cancers, are eating into the very vitals of the public morals.
The new representation in the enlarged Indian Councils was based proportionally upon a rough estimate of the populations of India which credited the Hindus with millions that are either altogether outside the pale of Hinduism or belong to those castes which the majority of educated Hindus of the higher castes still regard as "untouchable."
If he were a Brahmin, one essential piece of our administrative apparatus in India would be wanting, and without it the whole machinery would assuredly go out of order. Nor is it easy to see how we could replace him. Not one of the other castes would serve even as a makeshift. They are all too far removed from the Brahmin.
As for Brahminism, the Hindu religion, it is perhaps the most illiberal cult which ever afflicted mankind, dividing society as it does into an infinity of rigid castes between which no real intercourse is possible; each caste regarding all those of lesser rank as unclean, polluting creatures, scarcely to be distinguished from animals.
Believe not that these miserable people represent the lowest grade of degradation in Lanka's isle, for there are two outcast races so far beneath them in the social scale as to be avoided by Rodiyas as if they reeked with a pestilential disease. These castes are hopelessly beyond the pale.
The Hindoos do not thus imitate the English, for they are too proud of their own customs. Hindoo ladies never go into company; but Cingalese ladies may be seen at parties, arrayed in colored satin jackets, and adorned with golden hair-pins, and diamond necklaces. You have heard of the foolish ideas the Hindoos entertain about castes. It is the Brahmin priests who teach them these opinions.
The Mussalmans pushed them off. Thy father was a pastry-cook He stopped; for there shuffled round the corner, from the roaring Motee Bazar, such a man as Kim, who thought he knew all castes, had never seen. He was nearly six feet high, dressed in fold upon fold of dingy stuff like horse-blanketing, and not one fold of it could Kim refer to any known trade or profession.
At any rate, it is sufficiently differentiated from Brahmanism by its opposite notion of castes, and from Buddhism by its cultus of nakedness, which the Buddhists abhor.
They dwell in miserable hovels, distant from cities and villages, and are under no restrictions in regard to food, which last is not a privilege, but a mark of ignominy, as if they were so degraded that nothing could pollute them. The three higher castes are prohibited entirely the use of flesh.
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