The Untouchables - 3

...The degrading is also evident from degrading of onion and garlic from eatable to non-eatable category. Same is the case with beef eating. In Rig Vedic times, it enjoyed the place of pride in the food. However with passage of time it was degraded to non-eatable category. Its consumption by any of the four Varna came to be punishable by ostracization.

A further degradation in jobs category gave birth to fifth category which later came to be known as Antyajas or untouchables. This group was not known in later Vedic times but came into existence by the time of Manusmriti. These people dealt with butchering, dead bodies, skinning, garbage cleaning etc. These groups were butchers, skinners and scavengers etc. The butcher deal in selling the meat; the skinners or Chamars dispose the dead bodies of animals; the scavenges or Bhangis clean the city and village streets and dispose excreta. The jobs of Chamars (tanning the animal skins) and Bhangis (disposing human excreta) smell very badly and are really unclean. No one can stand in that environment for a long time. These jobs are really despicable jobs. Then we have a group of jobs which are shunned by people. In addition, since the jobs degrade the man to their level, the people engaged in such jobs are degraded and also shunned. And people go through a purification process after they come into contact with them. So a category was born called untouchables. Generally these people were force to live at the southern end of a village or a city. To maintain the purity of village, city and people belonging to higher Varnas, they were not allowed to stay within the city. It is noticeable that mainly those people were classified as untouchables whose services were not directly needed by the lawmakers, the Brahmanas.

Though untouchability cannot be traced back to Rig Veda, the existence of a purifier is very prominent in it. This purifier is water.

A purifying process, after a contact with an untouchable or his shadow, generally involves taking a bath, sprinkling sacred water on body and inanimate things and chanting Vedic mantras.

Another contributory factor for development of untouchability was to maintain the purity of pious Brahmanas, the lawmaker, who were constantly in touch with the sacred scriptures. If they got impurified then they were not eligible to chant or read the Vedas. So to make themselves eligible to chant and read Vedas and to remain equal to other pure Brahmans they had to purify themselves. If they did not purify themselves then their status within the Brahman community went down. So it was necessary for them to purify themselves every time they became contaminated by touch of a very impure person. One way out of this frequent purification was to direct these people to not to come in touch with them. So these very impure people became untouchables. The society was stretching itself at both the ends...