The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1932, Page 174

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174

THE LUTHERAN PIONEER

The huts around are dilapidated and dirty, little
more than rough, crooked poles supporting a make-
shift thatch roof, with mud walls built up after-
wards. The dim interior is divided by a half-wall,
the inner portion being the sleeping-place. The
whole hut is seldom more than ten or twelve feet
square. All is squalor and wretchedness. During
the rains the roof leaks, and the floor soon becomes
a puddle.

This poor hamlet is the home of the “outcastes,”
people who are below all the castes and outside the
pale of orthodox Hinduism. The outcastes are
often called the “untouchables.” Their very pres-
ence is pollution; they are despised and shunned
by all. Their ancestors were slaves, bought and
sold with the land. With the advent of British
rule, slavery has passed, but the servitude and deg-
radation remain. The outcastes do all the scav-
enger work of the village and all the most menial
work in the fields. They live on the coarsest food,
they are not allowed to use the village well, they
dress in the poorest rags and are utterly illiterate
and superstitious. They know nothing of the
meanest comforts and are destitute of all but the
barest necessities of life. .The children run about
naked, playing as children will — even though they
be despised outcastes — or chasing the dirty black
pig that is uprooting the gourd that sprawls over
a clump of cactus and up over the roof of the hut.
Some outcastes possess an ugly domestic animal
known as water-buffalo, and others have a few goats
or chickens. A few of the more prosperous may
own a couple of acres of land. But even these are
extremely poor. A recent and most thorough in-
vestigation shows the family budget for one year
for a family of three adults and five children,
owning one acre of wet land and one acre of dry.
The total income from all sources is proved to work
out at less than £13 per annum. And the family
of eight people have to live on this pittance.

The grinding poverty of the outcastes makes
them a ready prey to the money-lender, and often
the land-owner for whom they labor strengthens his
hold upon them by lending them money at a rate
of interest that makes it impossible for them ever
to free themselves. Thousands are in debt for years
over a matter of a few rupees, being barely able to
pay the interest and utterly unable to reduce the
loan. In some parts, especially in the native states,
if is not an unknown thing for a man to bind his
wife, his children, and himself for long years of
servitude as security for a very small loan.

The outcastes’ life is one of toil, privation, and
fear. The hamlet is deserted during the daytime,
for all the people are in the fields, working ankle-
deep in mud and water as they transplant the young
rice shoot by shoot. In the evening they go home
for a scanty evening meal, and then wrap them-
selves in their tattered blanket for the night. This
is the ordinary daily round of India’s fifty millions
of outcastes.

There are terrors all around them. They pass
their lives in fear of evil spirits, whom they try to
propitiate at little devil-shrines. More real dangers
are not wanting. The girls go out in the dusk to
gather fire-wood and by mistake pick up for a stick
a deadly snake. Or perhaps during the wet season,
when the ground around the village is flooded,
a cobra gets into the hut at midnight, and some
sleepy inmate rolls over upon the venomous reptile.
Within an hour all is over. There are leopards in
the jungle around, and though they seldom attack
men and women unless startled, they carry off chil-
dren or goats whenever they have the opportunity.
There are bears on that bold rock-strewn hill half
a mile away, and it is no uncommon thing for a
man or woman to be mauled by one. Perchance
a man-eating tiger is keeping the whole neighbor-
hood in a state of alarm, and the outcaste knows
that his door — mere wickerwork daubed over with
mud —is but slender protection against such a
beast. Incredible as it may seem to those who do.
not know India, the government returns show that
every year about 21,000 people are killed by snakes.
and over 2,000 by wild animals. Medical mission-
aries frequently deal with unfortunate people who-
have been attacked, but have managed to escape:
with a severe mauling. Of course, all village people,
of whatever caste, are liable to these dangers; but
it is the outcastes who suffer most, because their
dwellings are less secure and their mode of life-
more exposed. —India and Her Peoples.

The Dying Indian Boy and the Bible.

“T found him,” says the missionary, “dying of
consumption and in a state of the most awful pov-
erty and destitution in a small birch-rind-covered
hut, with nothing but a few fern leaves under him
and an old blanket over him. After recovering
from my surprise, I said, ‘My poor boy, I am sorry
to see you in this state; had you let me know,
you should not have been lying here. He replied,.