Gold, Sport, and Coffee Planting in Mysore: With chapters on coffee planting in Coorg, the Mysore representative assembly, the Indian congress, caste and the Indian silver question, being the 38 years' experiences of a Mysore planterElliot, Robert H. (Robert Henry)
History
Gold, Sport, and Coffee Planting in Mysore: With chapters on coffee planting in Coorg, the Mysore representative assembly, the Indian congress, caste and the Indian silver question, being the 38 years' experiences of a Mysore planter
Elliot, Robert H. (Robert Henry)
Caste -- India; Coffee; Karnataka (India) -- Description and travel; Karnataka (India) -- Politics and government
less isolated, instead of being grouped in villages, the temptations to
immorality were necessarily slight. Their temptations, though, as regards
the Pariahs, who were, when I entered Manjarabad, merely hereditary serfs,
were considerable; and there it was that the value of caste law came in.
Caste said, "You shall not touch these women;" and so strong was this law,
that I never knew of but one instance of one of the better classes
offending with a Pariah woman.[32] Some aversion of race there might, no
doubt, have been, but the police of caste and its penalties were so strong
that he would be a bold man indeed who would venture to run any risk of
detection. To give an idea of how the punishment for an offence of this
kind would operate, it may be added that, if one of the farming classes in
this country, on a case of seducing one of the lower, was fined by his
neighbours £500, and cut by society till he paid the money, he would be in
exactly the same position as a Manjarabad farmer would be who had violated
the important caste law under consideration. Here, therefore, we have a
moral police of tremendous power, and the very best proof we have of the
regularity with which it has been enforced lies in the fact that the
Pariahs and the farmers are distinguished by a form and physiognomy almost
as distinct as those existing between an Englishman and a negro. Caste,
then, as we have seen, protects the poor from the passions of the rich,
and it equally protects the upper classes themselves, and enforcedly makes
them more moral than, judging from our experience in other quarters of the
globe, they would otherwise be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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