Social and Cultural Anthropology in Perspective by Ioan Lewis

Author:Ioan Lewis [Lewis, Ioan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, General, Cultural & Social
ISBN: 9781351490634
Google: wmVQDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-09-29T03:44:27+00:00

Kshatriyas : rulers and warriors

Vaishyas : merchants and farmers

Shudras : artisans, labourers, craftsmen and servants

Untouchables : barbers, washermen, sweepers, night-soil removers etc.

The first three categories constitute the so-called ‘twice-born’,27 and with the Shudras make up the traditional four estates or varnas of Vedic literature. The untouchables stand alone, and at an appropriate distance, but in practice form an indispensable part of the fivefold caste complex. Throughout the Hindu world, people belong to one of these five categories, with everything that implies, by virtue of their birth within a particular sub-caste or caste (jati). There are thousands of different castes and sub-castes, all in principle associated with a particular occupation. You name it, and some caste does it Thus, as a Brahmin farmer teleologically explained : ‘Caste arose because one man alone cannot do all the work himself. One person cannot do the work of a teacher, farmer, priest, smith, soldier – he would never have time. Therefore different castes were created to perform these different tasks.’28 Different occupations, however, also imply different ranks or statuses. So as another Brahmin explained : ‘Low castes came into existence because some tasks, like sweeping out latrines or skinning dead animals, are dirty and repulsive : ordinary people do not wish to associate with those who do such work, and therefore separate castes were formed.’ The argument from necessity seems here to possess an almost irrefutable logic.

Caste, of course, is much more than simply a special case of closed-shop trade-unionism. As well as enjoying a monopoly, at least locally, in a particular occupation, each caste or caste division is rigidly endogamous and possesses its own distinctive culture (or sub-culture) and even sometimes language. Caste barriers, particularly in the two critically sensitive areas of intimacy – sexual intercourse and food-sharing – are stressed in a ramifying calculus of degrees of contact and pollution, to protect and preserve ritual purity. Many studies (most impressively perhaps that of Adrian Mayer)29 show how this imparts an extraordinary Kafkaesque complexity to daily life, since the most subtle nuances in relations between different castes are invested with immense significance. It is not simply a question of; would you allow your daughter to marry a …? Minutely detailed rules regulate who and in what circumstances may smoke together without fear of pollution; which castes may accept water, in their own or other vessels, from which; how, and with what degree of deference, and at what physical distance members of different castes should greet and approach one another.

So amongst the Nayars (Nair) of Travancore, as an English observer recorded in 1834, ‘untouchables hid themselves in ditches or climbed up trees to prevent atmospheric pollution; if a Nair accidentally met one of them on his road, he cut him down with his sword with as little compunction as a noxious animal’. For an untouchable, consequently, the time taken on a journey depended on the actual distance and also on the number of high-caste people encountered en route. Today in Travancore, as elsewhere in

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