[Occupations.] 26. The Chamâr practises a variety of occupations. His primary business is curing skins and shoemaking, and the latter business has developed what is really a separate caste, that of the Mochi (Sans: mochika); in a village he provides all leathern articles used in husbandry, such as whips, thongs, well buckets, and the like. As a rule, he has a circle of constituents (jajmân) whose dead cattle he receives, and to whom he gives leather and a certain number of shoes in return. His wife has similarly a certain number of families to whom she acts as midwife and performs various menial services at marriages and festivals. The Chamâr himself is the general village drudge (begâr, pharait), runs messages, and does odd jobs, such as thatching when he is called Gharâmi, and the like. Sometimes he receives wages in cash or kind, but perhaps more generally an allowance of grain per plough belonging to the family he serves, or a patch of rent-free land. Another part of his duties is to beat drums and blow trumpets during a marriage or when cholera or other epidemic disease is being exorcised from the village. Large numbers of Chamârs take to field labour, act as ploughmen, carters, grooms, or emigrate to towns, where they do various kinds of unskilled work. In Partâbgarh they are said to have usurped the business of carrying palanquins, the hereditary occupation of Kahârs. The extension of the leather trade at Cawnpur has made it a great Chamâr centre. Many of them have become wealthy and aim at a standard of social respectability much higher than their rural brethren, and some have begun even to seclude their women which every native does as soon as he commences to rise in the world. 27. The system of tanning pursued by the ordinary village Chamâr is of the most primitive kind. The skins are placed in a pit and covered with water, containing lime (chûna) and impure carbonate of soda (sajji); after ten days they are taken out and the hair removed with an iron scraper (khurpi). They are again removed, sewn up in the form of a bag, which is again filled with the bark solution, and hang on a tree or stand. This process lasts five days, when the tanning is considered complete. [200] DISTRIBUTION OF CHAMÂRS BY SUB-CASTES ACCORDING TO THE CENSUS OF 1891.