The curing and tanning of hides is the primary occupation of the
Chamar, but in 1911 only 80,000 persons, or about a seventh of the
actual workers of the caste, were engaged in it, and by Satnamis the
trade has been entirely eschewed. The majority of the Chhattisgarhi
Chamars are cultivators with tenant right, and a number of them have
obtained villages. In the northern Districts, however, the caste
are as a rule miserably poor, and none of them own villages. A
very few are tenants, and the vast majority despised and bullied
helots. The condition of the leather-working Chamars is described
by Mr. Trench as lamentable. [459] Chief among the causes of their
ruin has been the recently established trade in raw hides. Formerly
the bodies of all cattle dying within the precincts of the village
necessarily became the property of the Chamars, as the Hindu owners
could not touch them without loss of caste. But since the rise of
the cattle-slaughtering industry the cultivator has put his religious
scruples in his pocket, and sells his old and worn-out animals to the
butchers for a respectable sum. "For a mere walking skeleton of a cow
or bullock from two to four rupees may be had for the asking, and so
long as he does not actually see or stipulate for the slaughter of the
sacred animal, the cultivator's scruples remain dormant. No one laments
this lapse from orthodoxy more sincerely than the outcaste Chamar. His
situation may be compared with that of the Cornish pilchard-fishers,
for whom the growing laxity on the part of continental Roman Catholic
countries in the observance of Lent is already more than an omen of
coming disaster." [460]