Note 69 — Introductory Essay on Caste

The group of village menial and artisan castes comes between the good cultivating castes who hold the status of the Vaishyas or body of the Aryans, and the impure castes, the subjected aborigines. The most reasonable theory of their status seems to be that it originated in mixed descent. As has already been seen, it was the common practice of members of the higher classes to take lower-caste women either as wives or concubines, and a large mixed class would naturally result. Such children, born and brought up in the households of their fathers, would not be full members of the family, but would not be regarded as impure. They would naturally be put to the performance of the menial household duties, for which the servile castes were rendered unsuitable through their impure status. This would correspond with the tradition of the large number of castes originating in mixed descent, which is given in the Hindu sacred books. It has been seen that where menial castes are employed in the household, classes of mixed descent do as a matter of fact arise. And there are traces of a relationship between the cultivators and the menial castes, which would be best explained by such an origin. At a betrothal in the great Kunbi cultivating caste of the Marāthas, the services of the barber and washerman must be requisitioned. The barber washes the feet of the boy and girl and places vermilion on the foreheads of the guests; the washerman spreads a sheet on the ground on which the boy and girl sit. At the end of the ceremony the barber and washerman take the bride and bridegroom on their shoulders and dance to music in the marriage-shed, for which they receive small presents. After a death has occurred at a Kunbi’s house, the impurity is not removed until the barber and washerman have eaten in it. At a Kunbi’s wedding the Gurao or village priest brings the leafy branches of five trees and deposits them at Māroti’s69 temple, whence they are removed by the parents of the bride. Before a wedding, again, a Kunbi bride must go to the potter’s house and be seated on his wheel, while it is turned round seven times for good luck. Similarly at a wedding among the Hindustāni cultivating castes the bride visits the potter’s house and is seated on his wheel; and the washerman’s wife applies vermilion to her forehead. The barber’s wife puts red paint on her feet, the gardener’s wife presents her with a garland of flowers and the carpenter’s wife gives her a new wooden doll. At the wedding feast the barber, the washerman and the Bāri or personal servant also eat with the guests, though sitting apart from them. Sometimes members of the menial and serving castes are invited to the funeral feast as if they belonged to the dead man’s caste. In Madras the barber and his wife, and the washerman and his wife, are known as the son and daughter of the village. And among the families of ruling Rājpūt chiefs, when a daughter of the house is married, it was customary to send with her a number of handmaidens taken from the menial and serving castes. These became the concubines of the bridegroom and it seems clear that their progeny would be employed in similar capacities about the household and would follow the castes of their mothers. The Tamera caste of coppersmiths trace their origin from the girls so sent with the bride of Dharam-Pāl, the Haihaya Rājpūt Rāja of Ratanpur, through the progeny of these girls by the Raja.