Note 54 — D.

Dhobi.,54—the washerman caste who take their name from the Hindi dhona (Sans. dhâv), to wash. Dhobis have no very distinct traditions of their origin. In Bihâr, according to Mr. Risley,55 they trace their descent from Gâri Bhuiya—one of the local gods of that part of the country. Another account makes them out to be the offspring of a Kshatriya father and a Chamâr woman. In Mirzapur they name as their ancestor a personage named Râwat, and say that Mahâdeva and Pârvati, disgusted at the filth of the people of the world, created the Dhobi to keep their clothes clean in future. Mr. Nesfield suggests that “the washerman represents an impure caste, but is many degrees higher than that of the Bhangi, from whom he has sprung. Both are descended from the Dom, whose sole wealth, according to Manu, must be dogs and asses. The Indian washerman has always been associated with the indigenous ass, which carries the soiled clothes down to the bank of the river or tank, and takes them back clean to the house. No Hindu of any caste, even the lowest, will wash his own clothes, and so the Dhobi has been formed into a caste which shall bear the impurities of all.” Mr. Risley disputes this connection of Doms and Dhobis through the common use of the donkey on various grounds. “In the first place the use of donkeys by the Dhobi caste is so far from being universal that it has given rise to the formation of a slightly inferior sub-caste called Gadhaiya. Secondly, beyond the highly conjectural identification of the Doms with the Chandâls spoken of by Manu, there is nothing to show that the Doms have the faintest partiality for the donkey. On the contrary the Magahiya Doms of Bihâr will not touch a donkey and regard the Dhobi with very special aversion.” It does not appear necessary to connect the Dhobi with either the Dom or Bhangi in order to account for the low social rank which he holds. One of his chief tasks, except among the Dravidian tribes who do the work themselves, is to wash the clothing of women after child-birth, and his association with blood of this kind, which is particularly abhorred, stamps him as specially impure. Like the Kumhâr he keeps asses; but every Dhobi does not necessarily do so, and may use oxen for carrying clothes to and from the river.