Caste viewed as a Doer
"It is matter for especial notice that in every
department of applied science we have to deal with
the unseen. All forces, whether in physics,
mechanics, or electricity, are invisible."
_Alexander Mackay, Africa._
THE division of the Tamil people, over fifteen million strong, into
Classes and Masses, though convenient and simple, is far too simple to
be of value in giving an accurate idea of the matter as it is understood
from within. As we said, it is only an outside view of things. A study
of Caste from an Indian point of view is a study from which you rise
bewildered.
What is Caste? What is electricity? Lord Kelvin said, on the occasion of
his jubilee, that he knew no more of electric and magnetic force . . .
than he knew and tried to teach his students of natural philosophy fifty
years ago in his first session as Professor. We know that electricity
exists, we are conscious of its presence in the phenomena of light,
heat, sound; but we do not know what it is.
Nothing could more perfectly illustrate Caste. You cannot live long in a
conservative part of India, in close contact with its people, without
being conscious of its presence; if you come into conflict with it, it
manifests itself in a flash of opposition, hot rage of persecution, the
roar of the tumult of the crowd. But try to define it, and you find you
cannot do it. It is not merely birth, class, a code of rules, though it
includes all these. It is a force, an energy; there is spirit in it,
essence, hidden as the invisible essence which we call electricity.
Look at what it does. A few months ago a boy of twelve resolved to be a
Christian. His clan, eight thousand strong, were enraged. There was a
riot in the streets; in one house the poison cup was ready. Better death
than loss of Caste.
In another town a boy took his stand, and was baptised, thus crossing
the line that divides secret belief from open confession. His Caste men
got hold of him afterwards; next time he was seen he was a raving
lunatic. The Caste was avenged.
It may be someone will wonder if these things are confined to one part
of the field, so I quote from another, working in a neighbouring field,
Tamil, but not "ours."
She tells of a poor low-caste woman who learned in her home, and
believed. Her husband also believed, and both thought of becoming
Christians. The village soothsayer warned them that their father's god
would be angry; they did not heed him, but went on, and suddenly their
baby died. This was too much for their faith then, and they both went
back to idolatry.
A few years afterwards their eldest child began to learn to read, and
the mother's faith revived. The soothsayer and her husband reminded her
of the infant's fate, but she was brave, and let her child learn. Then
her cow suddenly died. "Did we not tell you so?" they said, and for the
moment she was staggered; but she rallied, and only became more earnest
in faith. So the soothsayer threatened worse.
[Illustration: Cooking in a house of the Shanar Caste, always the most
accessible of all Castes here, but this is a specially friendly house,
or we should not have been allowed to take the photo. The small girl who
is grinding curry stuff on the stone is the "Imp" of chapter xx.]
Then a Caste meeting was called to determine what could be done with
this woman. The husband attended the meeting, and was treated to some
rice and curry; before he reached home he was taken violently ill, and
in three days he died. The relatives denounced the woman as the cause of
her husband's death, took her only son from her, and entreated her to
return to her father's gods before they should all be annihilated. They
gave her "two weeks to fast and mourn for her husband, then finding her
mind as firmly fixed on Christ as before, they sent her to Burmah."
This happened recently. It is told without any effort to appeal to the
sympathies of anyone, simply as a fact; a witness, every line of it, to
the power of Caste as a Doer. But there is something in the tale, told
so terribly quietly, that makes one's heart burn with indignation at the
unrelenting cruelty which would hound a poor woman down, and send her,
bereft of all she loved, into exile, such as a foreign land would be to
one who knew only her own little village. And when you remember the
Caste was "low," which they took such infinite pains to guard, you can
judge, perhaps, what the hate would be, the concentration of scorn and
hate, if the Caste were higher or high.
But look at Caste in another way, in its power in the commonplace phases
of life. For example, take a kitchen and cooking, and see how Caste
rules there. For cooking is not vulgar work, or _infra dig._ in any
sense, in India; all Caste women in good orthodox Hindu families
either do their own or superintend the doing of it by younger members of
the same family or servants of the same Caste. "We Europeans cannot
understand the extent to which culinary operations may be associated
with religion. The kitchen in every Indian household is a kind of
sanctuary or holy ground. . . . The mere glance of a man of inferior
Caste makes the greatest delicacies uneatable, and if such a glance
happens to fall on the family supplies during the cooking operations,
when the ceremonial purity of the water used is a matter of almost life
and death to every member of the household, the whole repast has to be
thrown away as if poisoned. The family is for that day dinnerless. Food
thus contaminated would, if eaten, communicate a taint to the souls as
well as bodies of the eaters, a taint which could only be removed by
long and painful expiation." Thus far Sir Monier Williams (quoted as a
greater authority than any mere missionary!). Think of the defilement
which would be contracted if a member of the household who had broken
Caste in baptism took any part in the cooking. It would never be
allowed. Such a woman could take no share in the family life. Her
presence, her shadow, above all her touch, would be simply pollution.
Therefore, and for many other reasons, her life at home is impossible,
and the Hindu, without arguing about it, regards it as impossible. It
does not enter into the scheme of life as laid down by the rules of his
Caste. He never, if he is orthodox, contemplates it for a moment as a
thing to be even desired.
Cooking and kitchen work may seem small (though it would not be easy for
even the greatest to live without reference to it), so let us look out
on the world of trade, and see Caste again as a Doer there. If a
merchant becomes a Christian, no one will buy his goods; if he is a
weaver, no one will buy his cloth; if he is a dyer, no one will buy his
thread; if he is a jeweller, no one will employ him. If it is remembered
that every particular occupation in life represents a particular Caste,
it will be easily understood how matters are complicated where converts
from the great Trades Unions are concerned. Hence the need of Industrial
Missions, and the fact that they exist.
A man wants to become a Christian, say, from the blacksmith or carpenter
Caste. As a Christian he loses his trade, and he has been trained to no
other. His forefathers worked in iron or wood, and he cannot attempt to
learn other work. Let the Christians employ him, you say. Some do; but
the question involves other questions far too involved for discussion
here. And even if we discussed it, we should probably end where we
began--facing a practical problem which no one can hope to solve while
Caste is what it is.
Just now this system is in full operation in the case of a lad of the
brassworker Caste. He is a thoughtful boy, and he has come to the
conclusion that Christianity is the true religion; he would like to be a
Christian; if the conditions were a little easier he would be enrolled
as an inquirer to-morrow. But here is the difficulty. His father is not
strong, his mother and little sisters and brothers are his care; if he
were a Christian he could not support them; no one would sell him brass,
no one would buy the vessels he makes. He knows only his inherited
trade. He can make fine water-pots, lamps, vases, and vessels of all
sorts, nothing else. He is too old to learn any other trade; but
supposing such an arrangement could be made, who would support the
family in the meantime? Perhaps we might do it; we certainly could not
let them starve; but it would not do to tell him so, or to hold out
hopes of earthly help, till we know beyond a doubt that he is true. This
is what is holding him back. He reads over and over again, "He that
loveth father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me," and then he
looks at his father and mother and the little children; and he reads the
verse again, and he looks at them again. It is too hard.
It is easy enough to tell him that God would take care of them if he
obeys. We do tell him so, but can we wonder at the boy for hesitating to
take a step which will, so far as he can see, take house and food and
all they need from his mother and those little children?
These are some of the things which make work in India what is simply
called difficult. We do not want to exaggerate. We know all lands have
their difficulties, but when being a Christian means all this, over and
above what it means elsewhere, then the bonds which bind souls are
visibly strengthened, and the work can never be described as other than
very difficult.
Or take the power of Caste in another direction--its callous cruelty. I
give one illustration from last year's life.
I was visiting in the house where the old lady lives upon whom the
afflatus fell. The first time we went there we saw a little lad of three
or four, who seemed to be suffering with his eyes. He lay in a swinging
bag hung from the roof, and cried piteously all the time we were there.
Now, two months afterwards, there he lay crying still, only his cries
were so weary he had hardly strength to cry.
They lifted him out. I should not have known the child--the pretty face
drawn and full of pain, the little hands pressed over the burning eyes.
Only one who has had it knows the agony of ophthalmia. They told me he
had not slept, "not even the measure of a rape-seed," for three months.
Night and day he cried and cried; "but he does not make much noise now,"
they added. He couldn't, poor little lad!
I begged them to take him to the hospital, twenty-five miles away, but
they said to go to a hospital was against their Caste. The child lay
moaning so pitifully it wrung my heart, and I pleaded and pleaded with
them to let me take him if they would not. Even if his sight could not
be saved, something could be done to ease the pain, I knew. But no, he
might die away from home, and that would disgrace their Caste.
"Then he is to suffer till he is blind or dead?" and I felt half wild
with the cold cruelty of it.
"What can we do?" they asked; "can we destroy our Caste?"
Oh, I did blaze out for a moment! I really could not help it. And then I
knelt down among them all, just broken with the pity of it, and prayed
with all my heart and soul that the Good Shepherd would come and gather
the lamb in His arms!
I wonder if you can bear to read it? I can hardly bear to write it. But
you have not seen the little wasted hands pressed over the eyes, and
then falling helplessly, too tired to hold up any longer; and you have
not heard those weak little wails--and to think it need not have been!
But we could do nothing. We were leaving the place next day, and even if
we could have helped him, they would not have let us. They had their own
doctor, they said; the case was in his hands. As we came away they
explained that one of the boy's distant relatives had died two years
ago, and that this was what prevented any of them leaving the house, as
some obscure Caste rule would be broken if they did; otherwise,
_perhaps_ they might have been able to take him somewhere for change of
treatment. So there that child must lie in his pain, one more little
living sacrifice on the altar of Caste.
The last thing I heard them say as we left the house was, "Cry softly,
or we'll put more medicine in!" And the last thing I saw was the
tightening of the little hands over the poor shut eyes, as he tried to
stifle his sobs and "cry softly." _This told one what the "medicine"
meant to him._ One of the things they had put in was raw pepper mixed
with alum.
Is not Caste a cruel thing? Those women were not heartless, but they
would rather see that baby die in torture by inches, than dim with one
breath the lustre of their brazen escutcheon of Caste!
[Illustration: "I determined not to laugh!" That was what she said when
she saw it, and she was fairly satisfied with the result of her efforts.
The jewels are gold, the seeley a rich red. A woman of this type makes a
fine picture,--the strong intelligent face, the perfect arms and hands,
the glistening gold on the clear brown, and the graceful dress
harmonising so perfectly with the colour of eyes and hair. The one
deformity is the ear, cut so as to hold the jewels, which are so heavy
that one wonders the stretched lobes do not break.]
This is one glimpse of one phase of a power which is only a name at
home. It is its weakest phase; for the hold of Caste upon the body is as
nothing to the hold it has upon the mind and soul. It yields to the
touch of pain sometimes, as our medical missionaries know; but it
tightens again too often when the need for relief is past. It is
unspeakably strong, unmercifully cruel, and yet it would seem as though
the very blood of the people ran red with it. _It is in them_, part of
their very being.
This, then, is Caste viewed as a Doer. It does strange things, hard
things, things most cruel. It is, all who fight it are agreed, the
strongest foe to the Gospel of Christ on the Hindu fields of South
India.