# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_September 1859_S278
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

278 On Caste Distinction in East India.

"understood in agreement with the development given of it in the remaining Symbols." And this is precisely the case with our Scandinavian General-Synodists, or our countrymen of the Northern Illinois Synod, who themselves reckon, to a certain degree, among the symbol-believing "wing." We will discuss this further in the next section.

On Caste Distinction in East India.
Some traits from the congregation, communicated by Miss. Kremmer.
(Compiled from and after a report of the same, December 1858.)

Refusal of table-fellowship is not, in itself, already a refusal of the fellowship of love. To the non-Indian it sounds very harsh when it is said: people of different castes do not eat with one another, and harsher still when he further learns that the Indians do not eat even with the European, because the latter, of course, belongs to no caste at all. Judging by European views, one is tempted to see in such a refusal of common eating nothing but a rather brusque display of unlovingness and contempt. But in India it is different: here the sharing of food marks the definite place that each person occupies in a people so peculiarly ordered; to give up this place therefore means giving up one's civil standing within one's own people. Although every Hindu, even the most distinguished Brahmin, feels only honored by association with Europeans, he nevertheless avoids table-fellowship with them — certainly not because he does not respect them, but chiefly because of the offense he would give his countrymen by such a violation of general custom and habit. We would therefore also do great wrong if we were to charge the catechists and other native helpers of the missionaries, without further ado, with superstition or unlovingness toward these their European superiors, teachers, and often downright friends, merely because they are not accustomed to eat with them.*) Where it is a matter of a genuine proof of Christian

*) Thoroughgoing table-fellowship between the European missionary and the Indian helper is in any case — quite apart from the Indian custom of caste — not very practicable. As is well known, the Hindu sits on the ground while eating, with legs crossed under him, and, following the custom of the East, uses his fingers as eating implements; and to this is further added that his mealtimes do not coincide with the European mealtimes in India, and that — what is more important — his foods themselves are so different that a European, with a stomach accustomed quite otherwise from youth, would have a hard time holding up under them. Thoroughgoing eating together between the two parties could only take place if either the European missionary could and might wholly Hinduize himself, or the Indian helper could and might wholly Europeanize himself. Against the former, however, stands the fact that this would itself be bound up with danger to life, and would be wholly contrary to the apostolic "becoming all things to all people": for in order to become all things to the Indian heathen, one must, before all else, precisely not become an Indian, but remain, in one's own "kind" (as the Hindu terms caste), that is, a European. Against the latter, however, there stands, besides, the fact that the upkeep of such an Indian helper would then cost at least five