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Updated: May 17, 2025
The pavement is still red with the blood of goats immolated to the Great Goddess, and her devotees who may have just missed the spectacle can at least embrace the posts to which the victims were tied. On an open pillared platform facing the holy of holies some of the high-caste worshippers await in prayer and meditation the moment when its ponderous bronze doors are from time to time thrown open.
Such men are staid and discreet, and when a European or a high-caste native is near will net their charge with most elaborate precautions; but in the ordinary haphazard chances of pilgrimage the precautions are not taken. The old lady is, after all, intensely human, and lives to look upon life.
The only comparison possible to the American mind is the attitude of the old-time Southerner toward the lowest class of negroes, and even in this case the prejudice does not extend so far as in the case of the Hindus, for the Southerner will eat food cooked by a negro servant, and will permit the latter to shave him, act as his valet, etc., something at which the high-caste Hindu would be horrified on the part of one below him in caste.
Indeed few high-caste Hindoos, except some Sepoys who found it prudent to emigrate after the rebellion, have condescended, or dared, to cross the 'dark water'; and only a very few of those who come west are Mussulmans.
But he could not tell whether it was Mrs. Noel's fate, or the husband's fate, or the thought of Miltoun that had moved her to those words. She puzzled him by her self-possession, so almost hard, her way of refusing to show feeling. Yet what a woman she would make if the drying curse of high-caste life were not allowed to stereotype and shrivel her!
It is customary to hold a death-feast for a man of no caste after five days, for a low-caste after one hundred, and for a high-caste after three hundred or even one thousand days. The soul remains in contact with the world of the living, and may be perceived as a good or bad spirit of as much power as the man had when alive.
The missionaries then pointed out that their high-caste converts simply retained these privileges and social customs because they would lose the respect of their neighbours if they abandoned those marks of station which they had inherited, and which they looked upon entirely as a civil prerogative.
Inman relates that once when a friend of his was conversing with a very high-caste Hindoo he casually uttered this word Amm or Om, whereupon the man was so awe struck that he could scarcely speak, and, in a voice almost of terror, asked where his friend had learned the word.
More than once a high-caste visitor in the verandah, when he was alone, has asked me for a drink of water; and there is no breach of caste so heinous as to take water from the hand of a Christian. Now and then a Hindu lad will display such an audacious courage in religious matters that it partakes rather of the nature of a boyish freak.
"Go inside, Gunga Dass," said I, "and fetch it out." I was feeling sick and faint with horror now. Gunga Dass nearly rolled off the platform and howled aloud. "But I am Brahmin, Sahib a high-caste Brahmin. By your soul, by your father's soul, do not make me do this thing!" "Brahmin or no Brahmin, by my soul and my father's soul, in you go!"
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