On a Shoestring to Coorg

by Dervla Murphy

  13

  Caste in Coorg

  21 January.

  Last night I came across a remark made in a letter home by a newly arrived ambassador to India. ‘No one,’ he wrote, ‘is allowed to marry outside his own caste or exercise any calling or art except his own.’ That ambassador was the famous Megasthenes, whom Seleucus appointed some 2,300 years ago as his envoy to the Mauryan court of Chandragupta, and I thought of him again this afternoon when Rachel appeared at the top of our ladder in bewildered tears, sobbing that Subaya was very angry because she had been trying to persuade her Harijan friends to come upstairs to play with her toys.

  Rachel is not easily reduced to tears so I can only suppose she had been frightened by something she could not understand – Subaya’s outraged fury at the very thought of Untouchable children putting a foot over this threshold – and hurt by what, from her point of view, was the injustice of his reprimand. She has, after all, been brought up to invite anyone she likes into her own home, and I should have warned her that in India things are different.

  In Indian cities, a foreigner might now live for weeks amongst Westernised Hindus without realising there was such a thing as a caste-system; yet one cannot live for twelve hours in rural India without having to accommodate it, and in the cities it has merely been modified – not abolished. Few ‘twice-born’ Hindus – however Westernised, atheistic, socialistic or liberal they may profess to be – would feel completely at ease sitting in a bus beside a latrine-cleaner.

  As aggrieved Sahibs used to point out, when accused of maintaining a colour-bar, the inter-racial barriers in India were first erected by Hindus. (Though it is true the British did eventually become as socially exclusive, in their way, as any Brahman.) What I tried to convey to Rachel today is the strange fact that the majority of Hindus value the caste system just as much as we in the West now value the ideal of social equality. It is not an affliction they helplessly endure but an institution which gives an essential cohesion to their unique and otherwise disparate society. Hence the declaring illegal of Untouchability by the Indian Constitution can at present be little more than a formal salute to an alien concept. Many criticised Gandhi’s singling out of Untouchability for abolition, leaving the rest of the caste structure intact, but the Mahatma well knew that the caste system could not exist without a foundation of Untouchables to take upon themselves those impurities which otherwise would pollute the whole of society.

  Although Hinduism is renowned for its ability to absorb outside influences, and change them more than it is changed by them, it may now have reached a crisis point at which its genius for assimilation can no longer operate. Richard Lannoy has suggested ‘institutionalized inequality’ as one definition of the caste system and it is hard to see how the official Indian government policy of social equality can either be absorbed into Hinduism or democratically imposed on hundreds of millions of citizens to whom it is repugnant. Something, it would seem, has to give – and this time it may be Hinduism. But not yet.

  At present – especially in South India – a man’s caste, rather than his personal talents, determines the degree of political power he can obtain: and this is having a disastrous effect on the national morale. India’s parliamentary democracy has of course given the uneducated but numerically more influential sub-castes an unprecedented opportunity to dominate their local scene; yet this opportunity is often wasted because caste still matters more than the interests or opinions of the individual voter.

  Gandhi, among many others, argued that those verses from Hindu scripture commonly quoted in support of Untouchability were interpolations or misrepresentations – which is probably true, since one can hardly imagine any religious scriptures, however primitive, prescribing the degradation and exploitation of millions. But it is too late now to oppose the day-to-day working of the caste system with academic arguments. Our neighbours here in Devangeri are not concerned about Vedic authority, or about the compromises that may have been arrived at 3 millennia ago between Aryan kings and Harappan high priests. What matters to them is the magico-religious code they have learnt at their mothers’ knees. This includes the lessons that faecal pollution is a spiritual and social calamity of the first magnitude, as is the slightest physical contact with a menstruating woman or an outcaste. And the Harijan child is taught, equally emphatically, to avoid contact with caste Hindus. Many Indian mothers habitually threaten their children with witches, ghosts and demons, or with Kali, the black goddess of destruction – or with pollution by an Untouchable, which is thus equated from infancy with the worst horrors imaginable.

  Throughout history a basic fear of pollution has affected many peoples, though none so radically as the Hindus. And, since it is impossible even to try to understand the caste system without taking it into account, I must make the point that Hindu notions of pollution are not bounded by the laws of hygiene. Impurity is naturally associated with physical dirt, but there is much more to it than that – as may be seen from Mary Douglas’s comments on the system underlying pollution rules:* ‘Defilement is never an isolated event. It cannot occur except in view of a systematic ordering of ideas. Hence any piecemeal interpretation of the pollution rules of another culture is bound to fail. For the only way in which pollution ideas make sense is in reference to a total structure of thought whose keystone, boundaries, margins and internal lines are held in relation by rituals of separation.’ I have been fascinated to discover that Mrs Douglas uses the Coorgs as a typical example of ‘corporate caste dread’, despite their own frequent and vigorous affirmations that caste taboos matter less to them than to most Hindus. Perhaps the gentlemen do protest too much …

  Hindus agree with Juvenal on the desirability of mens sana in corpore sano, but popular Hindu theories about how to keep a body sound range from the comic to the tragic. There is a widespread belief that semen should be conserved because it is the vital essence of the individual man, which is made in the head, from blood, and sustains both physical and spiritual health while it is stored there. This nonsense must have led to even more tension and domestic unhappiness than the Roman Catholic Church’s traditional teachings on sexual morality. It has also helped to lower the status of women, who are supposed to be much more lustful than men and are regarded as an ever-present threat to their husbands’ general well-being. Many Hindus believe that sexually unsatisfied women become witches and revenge themselves in the most horrific ways on the whole male population. So it takes a brave as well as a self-controlled man to practise continence; and the birth-rate figures indicate that such men are scarce.

  These curious biological misconceptions are also responsible for the obsessional attitudes of orthodox twice-born Hindus towards what and where they eat. Since the blood from which semen is made is itself manufactured out of the food one eats, any pollution reaching the stomach through the mouth will contaminate a man’s vital essence.

  All this might seem to indicate that ‘institutionalized inequality’ could be relatively easily abolished by some elementary scientific education. I have, however, mentioned only one of the caste system’s many facets, and it is not hard to find Hindu doctors and scientists of repute who are as rigid about certain fundamental taboos as any unlettered peasant. They will not dread their wives turning into witches, but neither will they admit Untouchables into their homes. Also of course there are by now many educated Hindus who in most respects ignore the caste and pollution laws, but they represent only a tiny minority.

  This afternoon, when I had soothed Rachel and done my best to soothe a still furiously muttering Subaya, I sat in the sun outside the back door while trimming beans for our supper. Rachel brought her toys out to the compound, in lieu of her Harijan friends coming upstairs, and after some time one of the little boys approached the back door and called to Subaya’s small son, asking for a drink of water. This was at once provided, in a brass drinking vessel, and the little caste boy directed the little outcaste boy to pick half a coconut-shell off the dusty groun
d and hold it out to be filled. When the water had been drunk the Harijan – who is 6 years old – took the shell to the edge of the compound and carefully threw it into some undergrowth where it could pollute nobody. Clearly these two boys are good friends within the limits imposed by caste – limits which both have recognised and accepted from the age of two or three.

  It is when one moves up in the social scale that the contemporary caste situation becomes somewhat confused, because of individuals or families being at various subtly graded stages of ‘liberation’. The Machiahs, for instance, after a lifetime in Bombay, are far less pollution-conscious than most stay-at-home Coorgs. They allow their Harijan neighbours to use their well – an enormous concession – and even employ some of them in the house, though not in the kitchen. Yet I found the unpredictability of caste attitudes well illustrated the other day by Mrs Machiah, when she and Rachel and I were walking back from the Ayyappas’ house. Ahead of us on the road Rachel saw one of her favourite playmates – an enchanting 5-year-old Harijan girl, who admittedly is always filthy – and immediately she ran to her and slipped an arm through hers. Away they went, skipping together in a continuation of some game started that morning, and I turned to Mrs Machiah, about to remark on the little girl’s charm. But my companion’s expression silenced me. She called Rachel, and I hesitated, caught between the devil of offending our friend’s susceptibilities and the deep blue sea of allowing my daughter to be polluted by caste-consciousness. Then, before I had resolved my dilemma, came the final twist to the situation. Suddenly the little girl’s mother appeared out of the forest, with a load of firewood on her head, and shrieked angrily at her child not to touch the mleccha. Why? Surely even the most uninformed Harijan is aware that mlecchas have no place – do not count, even as outcastes – in the world of caste? (A fact which of itself can give the foreigner in India a strange, underlying feeling of spiritual isolation.)

  I longed to ask Mrs Machiah about this but the whole subject of Untouchability is such a delicate one that it has to be approached – if at all – with great tact; and the moment did not seem auspicious. Most educated Indians are now hypersensitive on caste issues, not necessarily because they themselves are ashamed of the institution but because they fancy all foreigners despise it. Often an Indian will – with good reason – accuse a foreigner of over-simplifying and misinterpreting caste, and will then himself add fuel to the fire of misinterpretation by asking defensively ‘Don’t you have your caste system? But you call it class! Where do you send your children to school? Who would you like them to marry? Who do you invite to have meals in your house? What part of your town do you live in?’

  At first one is stumped by this, yet the similarity is slight between our constantly changing social classes and the completely segregated units which make up Indian society. The Portuguese saw this at a glance, when they arrived in India in the sixteenth century, and it was they who provided the word castas (derived from the Latin castus) to describe the intricate network of innumerable jatis (sub-castes) into which Hindu society had evolved by about the sixth century B.C.

  It is most misleading to refer to ‘the four castes’; life in India would be very different if each of its 454 million Hindus belonged to one of only four groups. What really counts is one’s jati (the word means ‘birth’), which is determined by specialised, hereditary occupation, and it does not at all follow that because two people belong to the same main caste or varna they can marry, or eat together. Varna – the Sanskrit word for caste – literally means ‘colour’, and even today an ugly, ill-made, fair-skinned Indian will be regarded as incomparably better-looking than someone who is handsome and well-built, but dark-skinned.

  There is an obvious parallel between the situation and behaviour of the Aryans, when newly arrived in India, and that of the Europeans in South Africa today. India’s Aryan conquerors were divided into three rudimentary, non-hereditary social classes – warriors, priests and common people – and were free of any taboos about intermarriage or eating together. But they were a tiny minority amongst the conquered Dasa, those indigenous, dark-skinned, flat-featured owners and cultivators of the land. (The word dasa later came to mean ‘slave’, which sufficiently explains the fate of these people.) Therefore, the instinct to preserve racial identity being very powerful, they made rigid laws – almost exactly copied by the white South Africans – forbidding inter-racial marriage and enforcing segregation. Much interbreeding of course took place before the caste system was developed enough to make such a thing psychologically impossible. But those of mixed blood were firmly consigned, with the Dasas, to the fourth caste (the shudras) who could never take part in Vedic rituals but were left to worship their own primitive, animistic spirits – which they still do, all over India.

  22 January.

  Today we went by bus to Mercara, to borrow books from the public library, and the twenty-six mile journey took two-and-a-quarter hours. Sitting beside us was a Devangeri neighbour, a slim, trim little man who has recently retired from the Civil Service and come back to his Ain Mane. He told me that oranges are the third most important crop in Coorg, after rice and coffee, and that the sweet, loose-skinned Coorg mandarins are famous throughout South India. But it seems the Coorg farmers – whose traditional rice cultivation methods are so scientific – do not make efficient orange growers. The main season is from December to March and most of the crop is transported by truck to Mysore, Bangalore and other cities. Pepper, he said, is another important side-line; it requires a lot of care, and the picking of the pods is a delicate and laborious business, but because of its value as a dollar earner this crop is being officially encouraged. (Coorg’s annual output during the 1960s was about 120 tons – a lot of pepper.) Cardamom, too, earns dollars; it grows wild in the evergreen forest along the Ghats and government loans are available to farmers who wish to start plantations.

  Mercara, when we first saw it, seemed an enchanting little backwater. But this morning, when we arrived fresh from our forest retreat, I felt myself in a bustling metropolis. To our great delight we met a party of elderly Tibetans from Bylekuppa, who had come up on one of their regular trading trips, and we all lunched together at the bus-stand restaurant. I had intended entertaining them, but to my discomfiture the charming old man who seemed to be their leader was adamant that the ferenghis should be his guests.

  We returned to Mill Point on the same bus with the same crew and I noticed that as a temporary ‘local’ I am not being asked to pay for Rachel. This time the journey took three hours because during the threshing season every travelling Coorg is accompanied by sacks of paddy. The rich move it by car or jeep (a distant jeep overloaded with sacks looks strangely like some prehistoric beast lumbering across the landscape), but the less rich move it by bus. And if half a dozen passengers are waiting every few miles with a few sacks each, and if all those sacks have to be carefully secured to the roof, and equally carefully handed down four or five miles farther on – well then naturally it takes three hours to cover twenty-six miles.

  26 January.

  India’s Republic Day – and I think of ten years ago, when I attended the superbly organised triumphal parade in New Delhi, and watched Pandit Nehru and Lord Mountbatten drive down Rajpath four months before the Prime Minister’s death. Today felt very different. All over India the celebrations were either cancelled or drastically curtailed, in deference to the world oil-crisis and the domestic economic crisis, which has led to police killing many food shop looters in states where millions are starving, resentful and violence-prone. On Monday next most Kerala schools and colleges are to be given a holiday because organised mass-opposition to the Government’s food policy is planned for that day and could lead to further serious rioting – and deaths.

  Republic Day has made no impression on Devangeri, apart from the formal ceremony at the local school to which Rachel and I were invited. To my intense alarm I found that I was expected not only to hoist the National flag at the opening of the ceremo
ny but to make a speech. Rachel, however, was thrilled – especially when I at last got hold of the right bit of rope and, as the flag unfurled, she saw a shower of multicoloured forest blossoms fluttering down to cover my head and shoulders.

  I felt quite exhausted after my efforts to communicate with the young teachers, none of whom is fit to teach English. Yet this is one of the three languages which Devangeri schoolchildren have to go through the motions of learning. (The others are Hindi and Kannada.)

  India’s linguistic problems seem almost as complicated as the caste question and a good deal more controversial. According to the ‘Three Language Formula’, approved in 1961 by a conference of Chief Ministers from India’s various states, schoolchildren in non-Hindi-speaking areas have to learn Hindi as well as their mother tongue and English. There are over 133 million Hindi-speakers, so more Indians speak this language than any other. Yet in a population of 560 millions it cannot be described as the language of the majority, as is frequently pointed out by the 37 million Bengali-speakers, the 30 million Tamil-speakers, the 17 million Malayalam-speakers, the 17 million Kannada-speakers, the 15 million Oriya-speakers, the 10 million Punjabi-speakers – and so on, and on, and on, down to the 142,003 Bhumji-speakers and the 109,401 Parji-speakers.

  The 1971 Census showed that since 1951 the literacy rate has gone up from 16•6 per cent to 29•45 per cent. However, with only 39•45 per cent of men and 18•70 per cent of women literate at present, in any language, it would seem rather too soon to attempt to teach Indian school-children three languages, each with a different script.