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Intermarriage between the two classes of the population became abhorrent to the ruling class, and all manner of restrictions were put upon their intercourse, till even the shadow of the outcaste falling upon the Brahman brought contamination.
One should not accept food if one is slighted and not received with due honours by the giver. A Brahmana, who does so, is soon overtaken by disease, and his race soon becomes extinct. By accepting food from the warder of a city, one descends to the status of the lowest outcaste.
The Chinese students were of course well known, for these aborigines had long ago adopted their customs and language. But the Chinese visitors were in company with the foreigners, and all foreigners were outcaste in this eastern plain. The men shouted the familiar "foreign devil" and walked contemptuously away.
Rebecca teaches a class of small boys in the outcaste Sunday school that gives preliminary baths. On this particular Sunday, however, she starts out armed not with the picture roll and lyric book, but with a motley collection of soap and clean rags, cotton swabs and iodine and ointment.
Under the thatch of each mud-walled hovel of the outcaste village there is the same stir of the returning day. Sheeted corpses stretched on the floor suddenly come to life and the babel of village gossip begins. In the house at the far end of the street, Arul is first on her feet, first to rub the sleep from her eyes.
Appasamy, she not only organizes other people for work, but in the depressed communities of Madras herself carries on the tasks of social uplift. As supervisor of a Social Service organization, she has the charge of the work carried on in fifteen outcaste villages. With the aid of several co-workers frequent visits are made.
The spirit of Christian social service opens many doors. There are Sunday afternoons to be spent with the shy pupils of the High Caste Girls' Schools at the opposite end of town. In the outcaste village beside the rice fields we may find the other end of the social scale twenty or thirty little barbarians whose opening exercises must start off with a compulsory bath at the well.
From such "men," also, the new Indians will accept frank condemnation of social irrationalities or political exaggerations, as e.g. the notion that those have right to claim full share in the British Empire's management who would outcaste a fellow-Indian for visiting Britain, even had he gone to state their case before the House of Commons.
We believed till then they were some sort of caste apart from the rest. We did not know they were outcaste. Now it is established by the evidence of our senses. They attack on all fours running like apes. They are specially careful for their faces. When death is certain to them they offer gifts and repeat the number of their children. They are very good single shots from cover.
The slightest recognition of a man out-of-doors or indeed anywhere would be to proclaim herself one of that degraded outcaste class as common in Moorish towns as in Europe. Of companionship in wedlock the Moor has no conception, and his ideas of love are those of lust.
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