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India the Land of Religions
Bengal, there is no intercourse between potters who
turn their wheels a-sitting and make small pots, and
them that stand up for the manufacture of large
pots. A certain class of dairymen who make butter
from unboiled milk have been excluded from the
caste, and cannot marry the daughters of milkmen
who churn upon more orthodox principles. Even
as late a census as that of 1901 reports, and in a way
gives its sanction to the Cimmerian notion that the
touch of the lower caste man defiles the higher:
7
While a Nayar can pollute a man of a higher cast only
by touching him, people of the Kammalan group, includ-
ing masons, blacksmiths, carpenters, and workers in
leather, pollute at a distance of twenty-four feet, toddy
drawers at thirty-six feet, Palayan or Cheruman culti-
vators at forty-eight feet; while in the case of the
Paraiyan (Pariahs) who eat beef, the range of pollution
is stated to be no less than sixty-four feet. ¹
Thus Hindu society is split into infinitely smail
divisions, each holding itself aloof from the other,
each engaged in making its exclusiveness as com-
plete as possible. Members of a lower caste cannot
rise into a higher caste; the individual is restricted
to such progress only as is possible within the con-
fines of his caste. To the Pariah the door of hope
1 Quoted from New Ideas in India, by the Rev. Dr. John
Morrison (Edinburgh, 1906), p. 33.