_Marriage Song of the Fisher Kolis._ [Illustration: DYER GIRL IN AHMEDABAD] Chapter VI THE WORKING AND ABORIGINAL CLASSES If it was difficult in any way to summarize the varying conditions of the middle classes and to present with anything like unity some picture of their women, to attempt the same for the lower classes is to face difficulties that are in fact insuperable. The middle classes, as in all countries, are much conventionalized, and are always busied with a conscious effort to live up to an ideal that may be misapprehended or incomplete, but is still in the main intelligible. The differences that exist are either geographical or sectarian--differences due to tradition and development in differing environment, in varying faiths, for instance, and doctrines. The lower classes, especially the aboriginal tribes, still stand so narrowly on the circumference of the Hindu system that, with a literal eccentricity, they evade the attraction of conventional rule and regulation. They are governed by customs, often of immemorial antiquity, which may be outside the orbit of Hindu precept, and by superstitious fears which lead to sudden and capricious divagations. The main criterion of their status and the chief factor of divergence in their lives is the degree to which they have accepted Hindu Law or, to put it more exactly, the Brahman customs recorded in Sanscrit scriptures and stereotyped in the decisions of the Law Courts. Broadly speaking, throughout India proper, the lower classes that stand within the Hindu system are the offspring of mixed Scythian and Dravidian parentage. But neither term can be taken too strictly. In Scythian may be included not only the hordes of White Huns, Gujjars, and Kusháns, but even some remote trace of earlier conquerors of Aryan race: Dravidian is little more than a collective name for the dark peoples who, before the dawn of history, were in possession of the Indian continent. From the two races in mixed and varying proportion are sprung the artisans and respectable cultivators of India, probably even the untouchable and degraded castes that cluster in dirty hovels on the outskirts of every village. In the far south they are almost, if not quite, Dravidian; in the north-west, where the five rivers flow, they are nearly pure Scythian. Between the two extremes are a multitude of shades and a multitude of customs. Even the Mussulman lower classes are in the main descended from the same constituents. Converts to Islam though they are and legally free to marry as they please among believers, they have usually restricted themselves to their fellows and have continued the line unbroken as it ran in the days of idolatry. The pretty dyer girl whose bright clothes and open smiling face is so much a feature of Ahmedabad, for instance, is by descent no different from her Hindu sisters. Where she has altered, where her gait is more free