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These low-caste people, on whom the people above them look down with contempt, are in their own fashion as tenacious of caste as their superiors, and they, too, multiply their divisions, one class maintaining its superiority to others. We have a large community called Chumars, "leather-people" as the word means, though many of them have nothing to do with leather.
Brahmins and chumars, bankers and tinkers, barbers and bunnias, pilgrims and potters all the world going and coming. It is to me as a river from which I am withdrawn like a log after a flood. And truly the Grand Trunk Road is a wonderful spectacle. It runs straight, bearing without crowding India's traffic for fifteen hundred miles such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world.
Other houses in the village are composed of unburnt bricks cemented with mud, or maybe composed of mud walls and thatched roof; these, being a compound sort of erection, are called cutcha pucca. In the cutcha houses live the poorer castes, the Chumars or workers in leathers, the Moosahms, Doosadhs, or Gwallahs.
The Hindoo will not touch a dead carcase, so that when a bullock mysteriously sickens and dies, the Chumars haul away the body, and appropriate the skin. Some luckless witch is blamed for the misfortune, when the rascally Chumars themselves are all the while the real culprits. The police, however, are pretty successful in detecting this crime, and it is not now of such frequent occurrence .
Which is much worse. If a man wants your money, he ought to ask for it, or send round a subscription-list, instead of juggling about the country, with an Australian larrikin; a "brumby," with as much breed as the boy; a brace of chumars in gold-laced caps; three or four ekka-ponies with hogged manes, and a switch-tailed demirep of a mare called Arab because she has a kink in her flag.
When railways were constructed, a proposal was made by leading Hindus to have separate carriages for separate castes, but compliance with the proposal was of course out of the question; and now high Brahmans and low Chumars who are never seen in the same temple even though they worship the same gods, as the presence of a Chumar there would be deemed a profanation may be seen packed in the same carriage in as close contact as two human beings can be.
In some parts of India, cattle poisoning for the sake of the hides is extensively practised. The Chumars, that is, the shoemakers, furriers, tanners, and workers in leather and skins generally, frequently combine together in places, and wilfully poison cattle and buffaloes. There is actually a section in the penal code taking cognisance of the crime.
Which is much worse. If a man wants your money, he ought to ask for it, or send round a subscription-list, instead of juggling about the country, with an Australian larrikin; a "brumby," with as much breed as the boy; a brace of chumars in gold-laced caps; three or four ekka-ponies with hogged manes, and a switch-tailed demirep of a mare called Arab because she has a kink in her flag.
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