Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 23, 2025
At this station there were four regiments of sepoys, and no Europeans except the regimental officers. One day a low-caste native, known as a lascar, asked a Brahmin sepoy for a drink of water from his brass pot. The Brahmin refused, as it would defile his pot. The lascar retorted that the Brahmin was already defiled by biting cartridges which had been greased with cow's fat.
They were irregulars, small, dark, and blackish, clothed in rifle-green with black-leather trimmings; and friends called them the "Wuddars," which means a race of low-caste people who dig up rats to eat. But the Wuddars did not resent it. They were the only Wuddars, and their points of pride were these: Firstly, they had fewer English officers than any native regiment.
That was very shocking, too, for the potter is a low-caste man, and his donkey is worse. When the priest scolded him, Mowgli threatened to put him on the donkey, too, and the priest told Messua's husband that Mowgli had better be set to work as soon as possible; and the village headman told Mowgli that he would have to go out with the buffaloes next day, and herd them while they grazed.
These merry-makers stepped slowly, calling one to the other and stopping to haggle with sweetmeat-sellers, or to make a prayer before one of the wayside shrines sometimes Hindu, sometimes Mussalman which the low-caste of both creeds share with beautiful impartiality.
It was one of the prerogatives of kings and nobles to have a gorgeous umbrella borne over their head by one of their retainers. It is only the gradual levelling up of classes that has made umbrellas almost universal. Even up to quite modern times there were certain parts of Poona City where Brahmins live, in which a low-caste man would not have dared to walk with an umbrella.
'But, said Kim, 'I am not a Sahib, and I say I made a fault to curse thee, Mahbub Ali, on that day at Umballa when I thought I was betrayed by a Pathan. I was senseless; for I was but newly caught, and I wished to kill that low-caste drummer-boy. I say now, Hajji, that it was well done; and I see my road all clear before me to a good service. I will stay in the madrissah till I am ripe.
That the quantity is insufficient to satisfy the cravings of hunger I can myself testify, having spent a month inside one of Her Majesty's best appointed Bombay prisons, and having noted with painful surprise the eagerness with which every scrap of my own coarse brown bread, that I might leave over, was claimed and eaten by some of my hungry, low-caste fellow prisoners!
Stones were flung at his door at night, people gathered opposite his house and made unearthly noises, invitations to ceremonial feasts were withheld, and at last he got so alarmed at the spirit of opposition which he had raised that he made one of the low-caste men of the village, who are under orders to the Patel, accompany him whenever he was out after dark.
There was an old man a Mussulman who pressed me to buy some truck or other, but not with the villainous camaraderie that generations of low-caste tourists have taught the people, nor yet with the cosmopolitan light-handedness of appeal which the town-bred Egyptian picks up much too quickly; but with a certain desperate zeal, foreign to his whole creed and nature.
Brown posted a sentry at the hut-door, and another at the crossroads which he was to guard, then went round behind the but to bargain with the goatskin-merchant. But he stopped before he reached the tree. "Boy!" he called, and a low-caste native servant came toward him at a run. "Is that fakir there still?" "Ha, sahib!" "Ha? Can't you learn to say 'yes, like a human being?" "Yes, sahib!"
Word Of The Day
Others Looking